THE COLOUR GROUP (GREAT BRITAIN

Welcome to
The Colour Group
(Great Britain)

Our next meeting is on Thursday 11 September 2008

Part of the Festival of Science in the European
Capital of Culture, Liverpooll

When Vision Explores Art

An all day meeting in the Victoria Gallery & Museum,
University of Liverpool
The Victoria Building is currently undergoing a £7.5m
conversion to house the University of Liverpool Art
and Heritage collections

See the Meetings pages for details of this and subsequent meetings

Check out the Colour events, not part of our program
are listed separately link

Reports submitted by the 2007 Palmer Award holders are here.

Please support our
patron members
(use links and see logos below)

Bentham Instruments Ltd
Cambridge Research Systems
ColorAcademy
Colorview UK Ltd
Department of Colour Chemistry
Kodak European Research
Lee Filters Ltd
NCS Colour Centre
Oil & Colour Chemists Association
Philips Research Laboratories
PPG Industries (UK) Ltd
The Royal College of Art
The Society of Dyers and Colourists
The Tintometer Ltd
Welsh Centre for Printing and Coating

Links to Patron Member web pages can found in our Patron Members page

Annual General Meeting
14 May 2008 at City University, London

Presenting the Certificate

Professor John Mollon (Cambridge) was elected an Honorary Member of the Colour Group.
He is seen here with Chairman Prof Lindsay MacDonald considering the finer points of the
Honorary Membership certificate.

Citation for Honorary Membership
Professor John D. Mollon, DSc, FRS

From time to time the Colour Group elects Honorary Members. The list includes such luminaries as W.S. Stiles (1966), W.D. Wright (1976), and R.W.G Hunt (1994). Today it is my pleasure to propose Professor John Mollon for this honour, a man who has achieved great distinction, not only in matters related to colour but also in vision science at the very highest levels.

Originally from Scarborough, he graduated in 1966 with B.A. First Class, in Psychology and Philosophy from Oxford University. In 1970 he received his D.Phil. in Psychological Studies. After a brief flirtation with industry as a post-doctoral Fellow at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in the U.S.A., he saw the error of his ways and returned to Oxford as Lecturer in Psychology at Corpus Christi College. In 1972 he moved to the Department of Experimental Psychology at Cambridge University where he has remained ever since, rising steadily to his appointment in 1998 as Professor of Visual Neuroscience.
His many honours include: Fellow of the Optical Society of America (1984), D.Sc. from Oxford University (1995), Fellow of the Royal Society (1999), the Newton Medal from The Colour Group (1999), the Tillyer Medal from the Optical Society of America (2000), the Verriest Medal from the International Colour Vision Society (2005), and the Crook Medal from the Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers (2008).

Professor Mollon has over 180 learned publications, best known of which are his three books: The Senses, co-authored with Horace Barlow in 1982, Colour Vision: Physiology and Psychophysics, co-authored with Ted Sharpe in 1983, and Normal and Defective Colour Vision, co-authored with Joel Pokorny and Ken Knoblauc in 2003. His primary research interests are in the visual perception of colour, motion, form and depth; and the genetic basis for individual variations in perception. A particular research interest has been the evolutionary origin of colour vision, epitomized by the problem of “how to find cherries among the leaves”. This was exemplified by his paper “Chromaticity as a signal of ripeness in fruits taken by primates” in the Journal of Experimental Biology in 2000. He has also immersed himself deeply in the history of colour science.

John is a first-rate exponent of the lecture-demonstration. I still have vivid recollections of his talk on “Seeing colour”, as one of the eight-lecture series on colour at Darwin College, Cambridge, in 1993. After a wide-ranging discussion that included: the ancient mammalian system of colour discrimination; the polymorphic colour vision of New World monkeys; his unfulfilled search for a tetrachromatic woman; the special phenomenal status of Hering’s four perceptual hue primaries; the relativity of colour constancy; and the greatest lecture on colour perception ever delivered (by the French mathematician Gaspard Monge in revolutionary Paris in 1789); he concluded succinctly that we judge colours by the company they keep!

John was a member of the Colour Group's committee for many years, serving as Chairman from 1991 to 1993, and he is remembered with gratitude as the Chairman who introduced the Granville teas. With David Palmer he first set the pattern for the annual January meeting on vision science at the Institute of Ophthalmology. In 1995 he was instrumental in the hosting of the AIC’s interim conference in Cambridge. Last year he organised a most wonderful meeting on colour vision at Gonville and Caius College Cambridge (his home College), in honour of Professor Robert Weale’s 80th birthday.
Ladies and gentlemen, I can think of no-one more eminently qualified than Professor Mollon to be an Honorary Member of the Colour Group, and I commend him to you for election.

Lindsay MacDonald (Chairman)
14th May, 2008

	Alun Foster, Chief Chemist of Winsor and Newton, described how madder plants were turned into the madder lake pigment. Members interested in costume appreciated Dr Foster's tie for its appropriate motif.

Victoria Finlay, author and traveller, fascinated the audience with tales of travel seeking out rare and exotic pigments across the World. She also revealed how she wrote her books on palettes and pigments

Patron Member logos:

This site is hosted by oxhey.net

Email: Group email address as an image

webmaster email
Last Updated: 15 May 2008