So colour is effectively an illusion. It’s an illusion that helps us see the world in the way that’s useful to see. Dr Beau Lotto, University College London
Colour-blind island [Pingelap] ... A painful burnt-out image ... 10% of the population of Pingelap are condemned to live in a totally black and white world. Michael Mosley, Countdown to Life: The Extraordinary Making of You III: The Final Push, BBC 2015
We live in a world ablaze with colour ... Earth is the most colourful place we know of. Helen Czerski, Colour: The Spectrum of Science I: Colours of Earth, BBC 2015
The pattern of dark lines reveals exactly what chemical elements are present in the star. ibid.
The spread of life across the Earth: communication in colour. Helen Czerski, Colour: The Spectrum of Science II: Colours of Life
Painting the Earth green: chlorophyll is the key to photosynthesis. ibid.
Melanin: the more you have, the darker you are. ibid.
The colours we can see are only a small part of what’s out there. Helen Czerski, Colour: The Spectrum of Science III: Beyond the Rainbow
The colours we see are down to how our eyes detect light. And how our brain then interprets that information. ibid.
We might say that all colour is an illusion. ibid.
Different colours had different temperatures. ibid.
The perceptions that we call colours are tools used by our brains to label important distinctions in the real world. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
A day of dappled seaborne clouds.
The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose? James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Colour doesn’t actually exist. The Brain with David Eagleman: What is Reality? BBC 2016
Colour helped give primates the advantage. Professor Iain Stewart, How to Grow a Planet II: The Power of Flowers, BBC 2012
For those of you with black and white sets, Liverpool are wearing the all-red strip. David Coleman
‘I can see colours that nobody else can.’ Incredible Medicine: Dr Weston’s Casebook III, BBC 2017
He [James Clerk Maxwell] established that primary colours for light as red, blue and green. Iain Stewart, Scotland’s Einstein: James Clerk Maxwell: The Man Who Changed the World, BBC 2017
Think of the Gothic cathedral and you think of the austerity of stone. Rows of saints and angels, and angels ushering the righteous into heaven and thrusting the damned into the halls of hell … The whole of the architectural design was meant to optimize that flood of heavenly-coloured light. Shining down on you in Chartres cathedral were the stories of the Bible. Simon Schama, Civilisations 1e7: Radiance, BBC 2018
The first great colourist to set Venetian art on this path and to do it with the dazzling luminousness of oils on wood was Giovanni Bellini. ibid.
The largest ceiling fresco ever painted: painted in the 1750s by Venetian artist Giambattista Tiepolo it’s a vision of Apollo the sun-god. ibid.
Another culture’s rapturous embrace of colour … the ancient Hindu festival of Holi. ibid.
The black paintings seem to me to be an endgame for Goya. ibid.
Eventually, a new generation of Western artists would put colour back into European art. But their inspiration would come from another culture on the other side of the world – Japan. ibid.
It was Vincent van Gogh who’d reach most feverishly towards an even more radiant redemptive in paint. ibid.
The natural world is full of colours. Colours that attract attention, colours that blend beautifully with their background, and colours that create extraordinary displays. There are few animals more brilliantly coloured than these scarlet macaws. Attenborough’s Life in Colour I, BBC 2021
The rocky hills of southern India – the stage is set for a performance of one of the most spectacular dances in the natural world: Peacocks are gathering. ibid.
Flowers have evolved these ultra-violent markings for the benefit of insects such as butterflies. ibid.
Some animals use their colours to help them hide and disappear into the background … Colour can both conceal and confuse. Attenborough’s Life in Colour II
One theory is that the [zebra’s] black and white stripes make it difficult for flies to judge the distances. ibid.