Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green by Michael Wilcox - A Review by Aidan Hickey

“Blue and Yellow don’t make Green” was written and published by Michael Wilcox in 1987. It has been reprinted 15 times.

The book has a brilliant title… a convincing thesis… and a slight problem.

Wilcox’s contention is that painters repeatedly mix “muddy grey”, rather than the shade they want, simply because they don’t understand what colour is.

Calling on his background in science, he describes how objects absorb light. An object we perceive as black absorbs all of the spectrum. A blue object absorbs all of the spectrum except the blue. The blue light, reflected back, is what we see.

Applying this to the mixing of blue and yellow paint… logically, the blue particles should absorb all of the yellow, while the yellow absorbs all of the blue… leaving only black! The reason this does not happen, Wilcox insists, is that there are no pure primary colours. Both blue and yellow contain elements of green. It is these elements that survive the self-destructive meeting of the original colours.

His theory is presented in a colour wheel that refines each colour in relation to its near neighbours… eg. Orange-yellow… yellow… and green-yellow.

There is even a useful looking, colour-coded palette - on sale from Wilcox’s company - to reinforce this concept.

So far so good… The central point has been made… But we’re only at page 35 of a 200 page book! What follows is a series of exercises… (40+ by my count)… exploring the production of every possible hue on the colour wheel.

How useful can so much abstract repetition be once the principle has been established?

A far better introduction to Michael Wilcox’s vast knowledge of the subject is his “Advances in Colour Harmony and Contrast for the Artist” The title may not be so snappy, but the exercises in the later book are not “abstract”. They are focused on the ways colours may be combined to make more attractive pictures.

The problem with “Blue and Yellow don’t make Green” is that the information it offers – however accurate - is not enough to sustain a book. In an attempt, perhaps, to mask this, the author becomes argumentative. With a slightly conspiratorial tone, he suggests that the only ones who benefit from our ignorance of colour – and the waste caused by that - are the paint-manufacturers!

Never-the-less… in as far as a scientific-illiterate can be, I’m convinced by Wilcox’s claims about colour, light and paint particles. Green may well be nothing more than the impurities that remain after the fusion of Blue and Yellow. But I’d question that this knowledge must dramatically improve our colour-mixing habits. Maybe it’s Luddite to say so… but, 90% of our learning about what happens on the palette is trial, error… and intuition… After a while even the dimmest of us realise important things like… “Ultramarine and Cadmium Yellow do not make (a nice bright) Green.”

Then we test what we can get from Cerulean Blue and Lemon Yellow… Eureka!