My high school art teacher communicated in words and exhales. A humf over your shoulder carried more than most people’s sentences. One day while sketching a still life I heard a humf over my shoulder. I looked up. He looked down over the frame of his reading glasses and asked me a question I wasn’t prepared for.

“I see a lot of lines on your drawing. Look around the room. Point to one line you see in the world around you.”

We looked around the room. The edge of a desk. The frame of a window. The corner where two walls met. I surveyed. He waited.

“There are no lines,” he said. “There are two planes of shades of color that intersect and give the illusion of a line.”

I put my pencil down and looked at the drawing differently. Every edge I had rendered as a line was actually a boundary; the place where two planes of different shade or color met. The line wasn’t a thing. It was a perception. The real information was in the planes themselves: their relationship, their contrast, the quality of the boundary between them.

I have been finding those intersections ever since.

I am colorblind.

Color had always been contested territory for me. I had been corrected so often by teachers, friends, or anyone that I stopped trying to work in it. Being told repeatedly that your version of the world is incorrect is exhausting. Eventually you stop arguing. So I was uncomfortable working with color in art. Pencil and charcoal were my mediums: precise, predictable, controllable.

So when that same art teacher told me I needed to produce a color piece for the year-end art show, I was nervous. I painted an oceanside cityscape at sunset in watercolor markers. Rich yellows, reds, and oranges in the sky. The city skyline blacked out entirely, a silhouette against the warm sky. The ocean in deep, blue tones.

I was quite happy with it.

I was sitting on a stool next to my work that evening when a grandmother stopped in front of the painting. Silver hair. Glasses on the tip of her nose. She stood there for a long moment, the way people do when something genuinely holds them. Then she turned to me and asked:

“What a wonderfully rich scene. What made you paint the ocean purple?”

I had no idea the ocean was purple.

She didn’t see a mistake. She saw a choice. She didn’t know I was working with a different palette. She just saw the result, and the result stopped her in her tracks.

Colorblindness is not a handicap. It is a perspective.

I have spent thirty years extracting signal from noise. The tools have changed completely. The way I see has not.

There are no lines.
Seeing differently is not seeing incorrectly.

The world is full of intersecting planes of evidence. Most people draw lines through them. My job is to help you see where the planes actually meet; and what the color is telling you when you look closely enough.