Topics Color

Question Since I am doing a study about colors and how they relate to the natural world in ways that we perceive them, there is an obstacle for this research. What is the opposite color of Brown, a neutral color representing the balance of primary/secondary/tertiary (etc.) colors?

Accepted:
March 11, 2010

Comments

"Opposite" is not in this connection a very well-defined word. "Complementary" is more precise, but then we should inquire: physical additive complementary, i.e. such as to cancel the test colour in light superposition and produce neutral or white; physical subtractive complementary, i.e. such as to cancel the test colour in pigment mixing and produce neutral or black; psychologically complementary - it is unclear what this would mean, but it could have to do with the placing of the test in a colour space based on the psychologycal "unitary" hues, i.e. those that do not look as though they contain a "trace" of any other hue in the space.

There are some interesting studies of brown, and one of them (I think) is my own, in Jonathan Westphal, Colour: A Philosophical Introduction, Blackwell, Oxford, 1991 - the chapter on "Brown". Are we allowed to sound our own trumpets on this website? I'm not sure, but anyway this might get you started. The thing to remember is that brown surfaces have roughly the same reflectance as yellow ones, but they are quite a bit dimmer. It is as though brown is really a low-reflectance yellow, so one thing you might try is to see what the afterimage colour of brown is - is it similar to the violet afterimage of yellow, but dimmer? Afterimage complementaries give you yet another - psychological - sense of "opposite"!

The fact is that brown is not neutral. At its reflectance level, grey is the neutral. But I'm not sure what you had in mind with the phrase "representing the balance of primary/secondary/tertiary (etc.) colors. I think you may be mixing the metaphysical primary/secondary quality distinction with the physical distinction between "additive" and "subtractive" primaries.