I see white

As we drove along the curving mountain road, Alain talked about his blues, and I talked about my purples. Butterflies, he then told me are very good at seeing purple. In fact they have a very different range of color vision than humans. Reds are usually invisible for them, but they can see all the way up the rainbow scale from yellow to beyond violet and into ultraviolet.
How could anybody know that? I wondered aloud, and he told me that some flowers--and butterflies--appear to human eyes to be completely white. But when you look at the petals or wings under an ultraviolet detector, they are covered in ghostly markings that butterflies respond to as signals.
from:Color by Victoria Finlay p. 300-301

I read the book Color back in 2002. I woke up this morning thinking it was time to revisit it. The presidents press conference was on the radio, as I was reading this passage. What struck me is how differently we see things. How some of us see patterns and markings where others see none.

As a painter, you look at the image before you for hours on end. You have a close relationship with the surface. Every color and stroke that went into its making, is part of you. Visual impression combine with it's history to create what you see. But the observer, only sees the top layer. So as the painter you never quite know what the viewer sees.

I can't imagine what a butterfly sees or Frankenstein or even Mr. Eleven! Somehow we don't bump into each other and we manage to communicate, most of the time. There are so many variables, life experience, optics, memory...

The idea that butterflies live in a rich world full of color signals, where we only see white, is more than magical. It is science! It is really quite wonderful. It fills me with questions, mental perspective shifting gymnastics that are mind bending. Like Dr.Seuss' Horton Hears a Who, did when I was a kid. What we see isn't the only vision, isn't the only reality. Pretty cool stuff!