John Rattigan’s condition has made his art more original – and led to him buying a hideous turquoise car
My name is John Rattigan and I’m a colour-blind artist.
Even in my chromatically challenged condition, I have a fine-art degree and an MA and I taught art for over 30 years. Not in the rarefied atmosphere of an art college, where colour-blindness may not necessarily be a drawback in the world of installation, video or performance-based art, but in the secondary sector with its attainment targets, GCSEs and A levels.
As a practising artist, I haven’t taken refuge from the world of colour by turning to sculpture. I’m a painter who uses colour in an unabashed full-on way.
There are some common misconceptions surrounding colour-blindness. It is very rare to be totally blind to colour; to live entirely in a monochrome world.
More often than not, those who suffer from the condition are deficient in discerning hues from the red/green end of the spectrum. It is more common than you think and is primarily a hereditary condition, affecting eight per cent of the male population in most countries.
It affects only 0.5 per cent of the female population. They are the prime genetic carriers but tend not to be afflicted.
I’ve already used terms such as ‘deficient’ and hinted at those who ‘suffer’ or are ‘afflicted’ by colour-blindness – but exactly how much of a problem is it?
It would certainly be a problem if all art-making centred around descriptive, observationally based art, where the emphasis is on the slavish reproduction of appearances.
Luckily for me, when I entered art college in the early 1970s, no one put any barriers in my way – unlike the experience of friends who tell me that when they applied in the 1950s and 1960s,it was often a stipulation of many art courses that you should be fully functioning where colour vision was concerned.
I always knew, even before I was officially diagnosed (in a school medical via those Ishihara colour tests, where you do or don’t see various numbers embedded in circles of multicoloured dots), that mixing and matching certain colours was often a problem. And, strictly speaking, there is no cure for the condition.
Even today, I can find myself in a pickle. I once bought a new car and as I drove it home, I wondered why the salesman was so keen to sell the showroom model, a beautiful, glistening, metallic-grey colour, and give me such a generous discount. When I arrived home, I knew why. My partner took one look at it and told me its strong turquoise hue reminded her of a particularly repellent bathroom suite she’d had to live with in the 1970s!
I rarely have any difficulty with perceiving or using strong primary or secondary colours. Rich, saturated reds of the post-box variety, citron yellows, strong oranges or greens don’t pose a problem, especially if the colour fits an object’s generic profile. Violet/purple is a challenge because of the red component, as is brown. The real area of confusion often occurs when all these colours are treated tonally.
If you are colour-blind, you can play the colour-mixing game. You move down the chromatic scale of a colour such as red, by adding ever increasing amounts of white, edging towards very pale pink.
Then you do the same with green, grey or brown. You will find that if you make any of these pale enough and shuffle the final swatches, then, hey presto, you probably won’t be able to put them into their original order ever again!
Therefore, the primary survival strategy I adopt in my studio is always to keep tabs on where my colours originate from. There is nothing worse than mixing a batch of colour and removing the label or any reference to its identity.
Also, for my own sanity, I rarely embark on any painting project that’s concerned solely with pure transcriptions of what I see. Hyper-real portraiture of the painted variety is avoided at all costs!
Yet even the best observational art is about the selection and reordering of perceptions. Even artists who place colour at the centre of their practice rarely use it in a purely descriptive manner.
Post-Impressionists such as Cézanne and Gauguin adjust colours to create structural building blocks or for symbolic/expressive reasons. For every artist who depends on naturalism, there’s an equal number who distort and realign what they see. Compare Holman Hunt with Aubrey Beardsley or Lucian Freud with Frank Auerbach.
Rather than run away from colour, I have often confronted it head on. Ultimately, I refuse to be intimidated by my genetic inheritance.
A teaching colleague – a biology teacher and fellow sufferer – once said to me, ‘Look upon it like dyslexia; and think about all the poets, writers and scientists who had to overcome that condition.’
If you find you’re one of this small percentage, don’t turn your back on colour. Embrace the contradictions that come with your so-called colour-blind state and think of the quirky or original contributions you could be making to the world of art.
As long as you don’t work in the conservation department of the National Gallery or want to design maps for Ordnance Survey, there is endless scope for invention and creativity.
