AIC 2004, Color and Paints, Porto Alegre, Brazil, November 2–5, 2004

Abstract

A first glance at the titles of papers in the program for this meeting begs the question "What do most of these papers have to do with paint?" The meeting opened with welcoming remarks from Hanns-Peter Struck, president of ABCor, the Brazilian Color Association, and Paula Alessi, AIC president. José Caivano, AIC vice-president and scientific committee chairman, presented a history of AIC meetings. Javier Romero, chairman of AIC'05, invited attendees to the next quadrennial to be held in Granada, Spain. The first day included papers covering Color Perception, Environmental Color Design, Architecture and Landscape, and Color Emotion. The second day started with Color Space and Design, Color Education, and Aesthetics and Harmony. Although many of these papers did not specifically address paint, they all address aspects of color that are important in the use of paints. The end of the second day addressed Color and Appearance Order Systems, specifically addressing their use in paints, and closed moving away from art, design, and psychology of color to science and technology with a broad overview of Appearance in Paints. The third day continued with Appearance and Color Difference, Colorimetry and Textiles, and an overview of Color Technology and Paint. The meeting closed with remarks by Paula Alessi and a preview of the Sydney, Australia, 2009 Quadrennial by Nick Harkness. There were poster presentations each day, covering the same wide range of topics, as in the oral papers. A brief summary of each orally presented paper follows in the order of presentation. Abstracts may be accessed at http://www.fadu.uba.ar/sicyt/color/aic2004.htm.Osvaldo DaPos' opening invited paper on "When do colors become fluorent?" reviewed Ralph Evans' study of the psychological aspects of fluorescent colors. Evans defined "fluorence," an intermediate step between surface and luminous colors along a continuum called brilliance. Physical fluorescence is not necessary to evoke this impression. The lower branch of this continuum is characterized by a gray appearance, correlated with the visual impression of reflected light, which decreases from black to lighter colors until it completely disappears at a point called zero grayness. Where grayness ends, fluorence starts. DaPos' investigation was a systematic study of the luminance threshold, separating surface from fluorescent colors. He found that this luminance threshold differs as a function of hue and of NCS chromaticity. Yellow has a very high fluorence threshold, near to or higher than the luminance of surface white, and is followed by green, which still shows higher thresholds than those of red and blue. ALLAN B. J. RODRIGUES Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com).