Concetta Antico is an artist from San Diego and her paintings - juicy, bright, multi-colored - are a real symphony of the beauty of life. However, Concetta is a very unusual artist, she is a tetrachromat.
Tetrachromathy is the opposite of color blindness. Tetrachromats are capable of distinguishing hundreds of thousands of shades of colors that are inaccessible to the ordinary human eye.
Scientists have found that some people are endowed with the ability to distinguish more shades of color due to the fact that they have not three (which is the norm for humans), but four types of cones. While most of us only see 1 million shades, these lucky ones see 99 million.
Just imagine, this is almost a hundred times more than we all see.
The human eye contains two types of cones, which are encoded by a single X chromosome. Since women have two different X chromosomes in their cells, some of them may have cones with different pigments, as a result of which they are full-fledged tetrachromats and have four simultaneously acting types of cones - each type with a certain degree of perception to different wavelengths of light in the visible spectrum. One study suggested that 2–3% of women worldwide may have four types of cones, with a peak between standard red and green cones, resulting in a significant increase in color differentiation. Another study showed that 50% of women and 8% of men can have four photoreceptors and a corresponding increased gradation in color perception compared to trichromats. In June 2012, after 20 years of studying women with four types of cones (non-functional tetrachromats), neuroscientist Gabriele Jordan identified women who could distinguish a greater variety of colors than trichromats. Scientists also managed to find a woman with true functional tetrachromathy, who really distinguished shades much better than usual.
Of course, at the genetic level, such a mutation can be called a deviation from the norm: researchers are inclined to believe that during certain chromosomal malfunctions, men are born color-blind, but women have a greater predisposition to being tetrachromats.
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Concetta herself says that since childhood she saw the world oversaturated with various colors and shades, but found out about her diagnosis only in 2012. Doctors confirmed that Concetta has the ability to distinguish not only blue, red and green pigments, but also others, which means that he perceives the world differently than most people.
Conchetta was lucky, the art teacher from the art school where the girl went to study, drew attention to her specific features. She chose strange colors to paint pictures, and because of childish naivety, she did not understand what surprises her classmates.
The artist herself is philosophical about her illness, as she says - it is a gift from above. Concetta truly enjoys nature, observing its diversity and splendor. She tries to convey her feelings in pictures, although it is obvious that the viewer's perception does not coincide with the author's vision.
But the most interesting thing is that Conchetta's 12-year-old daughter also has vision problems, but, alas, she is color blind, unlike her mother.
CONCHETTA ANTIKO, artist, San Diego:
“When in February on the Internet everyone was arguing about the color of the dress - remember, some people saw it in white and gold, and others in black and blue, - friends bombarded me with letters:“Conchetta, you are the only one who can resolve this dispute.” Well, both are wrong. In fact, the dress was dark gray, with shades of lilac and blue and a subtle splash of pink. The yellow-gold color of the lace shimmered with grayish-gold, brown and light beige tones.
Few pay attention to color the way I do. I float in color, I'm just in love with colors. This is a very important part of my thoughts and emotions. Every day for me is another opportunity to learn new nuances of familiar things: lamps in the bedroom, plants on the window, sun glare on the parquet. Everything that surrounds me in the house must be perfectly matched by color, otherwise I feel physically ill. I see when your lipstick doesn't match the dress, when your hair color is discordant with your complexion. I can even understand when people are sick with something: the skin tone changes.
I learned that I am a tetrachromat quite recently - in 2012. In ordinary people, there are three types of cones in the retina of the eye, which convert light stimuli into a nerve signal. The cones are responsible for different color spectra - violet-blue, green-yellow, and yellow-red - and together enable humans to distinguish up to a million colors. Sometimes, usually in men, not all of the cones may work, and the person becomes color blind. And in the rarest of cases, a woman carrying a gene for color blindness is born with four cones at once, and then she has supersensitive vision. This woman is me. I don’t have to wear dark glasses, I don’t see objects clearer or brighter. But I see a hundred times more colors than others.
Scientists call it a mutation, and I myself call it a gift. Like many tetrachromats, for most of my life I knew nothing about him. I am an artist by profession, I have always been passionate about art and nature, and therefore my vision is functioning at full strength. In my youth, I grew up like a hippie, I loved walking barefoot in the garden and looking at the sky. I was born in Australia, my family lived outside the city by the bay, and kilometers of the coast were my playground. It always seemed to me that I was born in the wrong era: all these technologies look so gray and faded and take so much away from our world. There is nothing beautiful in concrete, believe me. All these are colors without color, flat and empty.
At the age of five, I got my first paints, and every day I redrawn the paintings of Cézanne and Van Gogh from the book. Then she began to copy the covers of music albums: The Moody Blues, Status Quo, Yes. Growing up, I collected all my savings and moved to San Diego. Here I opened a drawing school and taught several thousand people over twenty-five years of work.
The students constantly complained, "Concetta, I can't see the color you are talking about." We went outside to draw from life, and I kept repeating: pay attention to this lavender color on a tree branch, do not miss the blue tint on the stone and a smear of red on the blade of the grass. The guys nodded in bewilderment. I thought: probably the whole point is that I am a more experienced artist. And they physically could not see what I see.
Everything was revealed by chance. My father suffered from color blindness, my husband is also color blind, and once it turned out that color blindness was transmitted to his daughter. Color-blind girls can only be born with tetrachromats - that's how I found out. This is our family of strange colors. Now, every couple of months I take tests in the laboratory, scientists study my gift, write scientific articles about me. They are interested in me because my vision “does not sleep”, but is brought to the highest point. You can have naturally unique muscles, but without training they will atrophy. And I train every day.
Over time, my students also learn to see more colors. We all sit down together, and I explain: look at this sheet, focus on it, forget about everything around. Of course, if you only look at a TV or computer screen all day long, then when you are shown five different shades of green, you will say five times: this is green. And you will not notice hundreds of nuances in one small sheet: blue-green with a tint of orange and red, light green and pastel green, dark blue-green with a blue and purple tint. And look at a crow sitting on a branch. There are thousands of colors in his feathers: 50 shades of green, 50 shades of purple, 50 shades of gray, blue, light blue, blue-violet and dark gold. All colors in one bird, even pink.
My two sons have normal vision, just like my sister. My daughter has been drawing with me since she was five. I trained her for a long time, and now she sees colors that even an ordinary person does not always distinguish, what to say about color blindness. I was able to expand her capabilities, because the potential of a person is much greater than he himself thinks.
There is a lot of color in my paintings, and people often do not understand that I really see all these colors in the world around me, and therefore I transfer them to the canvas. My works allow you to see what is usually hidden. I am a very prolific artist, I work in the alla prima technique - I paint a picture in one session. If you put a vase with a bouquet of flowers in front of me, the canvas will be ready in an hour. Recently, at one exhibition, I drew a live peacock in front of the audience.
Several years ago I fulfilled my dream and bought a farm in Australia. Someday I will definitely move there and, as in childhood, I will observe nature. But before that, I hope I will be able to create a new genre: tetrachromatism, a mixture of science and art."