I mean, you take one look at Greek statues and Roman busts and you realize that people figured how to aim for realism, at least when it came to the human body and faces, over 2000 years ago.
Yet, unlike sculpture, paintings and drawings remained, uh, “immature” for centuries afterwards (to my limited knowledge, it was the Italian Renaissance that started making realistic paintings). Why?
I agree to an extent, but light is invisible. Colors are a frequency phenomenon and the same property in both instances.
Part of the art of mixing and matching paints for cars is abstracting the various spaces and focusing on each. I need to see the flat tone, opacity, coarseness and composition (metallics/pearls), layering (pearls), flop (how the color changes depending on facet angles and tint the tone of this independent of the perpendicular tone).
I’m unusual in this space as well. I specialized in very small repairs where I am mixing paints in much smaller batches than the minimum recipe supplied by the paint vendor for the original color code of the vehicle. I knew paints on a much deeper level where I mixed mostly by eye and intuition. I had many techniques, but overall, I had to know the tinting properties of around a hundred different colors and how each one would behave in combination with the rest. My skills were very much a matter of flattening my perspective and observing three dimensional colors as if they were a two dimensional abstraction with several little 2d bubble universe facets to play with.
It is a learned skill. I hired several employees over the years. It quickly becomes evident how a person thinks and their ability to see color on a level that most humans never encounter. Even now, I still know that white and black do not exist and are simply byproducts of other colors and properties. True black would be impossible to see, and white would be a blinding light source specifically tailored to the individual’s vision spectrum and neural processing. I see colors and complex properties in everything.