The British painter J.M.W. Turner had the habit, when studying a new landscape, to bend low and look at the scene through his spread legs. While somewhat unorthodox as an approach, this “change of perspective” allowed him to see past “colour constancy”. Colour constancy is the phenomenon of human beings attributing certain colours to objects from memory, rather than by actually identifying them by sight. So I might look at an orange, and everything tells me instinctively that it is orange. But if I manage to get beyond this instinctive reaction, then I will notice that the orange is actually partially white, in places dark brown and black, in others deep red- and yes, in some places orange. Colour constancy is such a strong instinct that painters have to invent techniques and tools so as to find a fresh perspective and thus to paint what they see, not what they know.
Colour constancy does not just affect painters; in our daily relationships we can also be prone to that phenomenon, by assuming that we already know what the other one is like. In order to make human interactions easier, we tend to put people into boxes, categories, schemata. And especially if we have known somebody for a long time, then the temptation is immense to attribute certain characteristics, “colours” and traits to the other. “I know what you are like” is what I say, at least to myself, and I stop looking and listening. In other words, there is no more mystery about the other, no more surprise, we have them pegged and figured out. But the truth is that we are wrong, and by making such assumptions we not only box the other in, we deprive ourselves of discovering new things about them. However long we have known somebody, there is always something new to discover. And if stop discovering, then our relationships become dull and predictable. So maybe it is time we bent over like Turner and took another look?
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