"Charles L. Harness - The Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

toward the semi-circle of white-budded wall beyond, and then continued: "There's nothing like a
school-within-a-school to squeeze dry the dregs of form. And whatever their faults, the pointilists of the
impressionist movement could depict color with magnificent depth of chroma. Their palettes held only the
spectral colors, and they never mixed them. Do you know why the Seines of Seurat are so brilliant and
luminous? It's because the water is made of dots of pure green, blue, red and yellow, alternating with
white in the proper proportion." He motioned with his hand, and she followed as he walked slowly on
around the semi-circular gravel path. "What a pity Martha isn't here to observe our little experiment in
tricolor stimulus. Yes, the scientific psychologists finally gave arithmetical vent to what the pointilists knew
long before themтАФthat a mass of points of any three spectral colorsтАФor of one color and its
complementary colorтАФcan be made to give any imaginable hue simply by varying their relative
proportion."

Anna thought back to that first night of the street dancers. So that was why his green and purple polka
dot academic gown had first seemed white!

At his gesture, she stopped and stood with her humped back barely touching the mass of scented buds.
The arched entrance was a scant hundred yards to her right. Out in the Via, an ominous silence seemed
to be gathering. The Security men were probably roping off the area, certain of their quarry. In a minute
or two, perhaps sooner, they would be at the archway, guns drawn.

She inhaled deeply and wet her lips.

The man smiled. "You hope I know what I'm doing, don't you? So do I."

"I think I understand your theory," said Anna, "but I don't think it has much chance of working."

"Tush, child." He studied the vigorous play of the fountain speculatively. "The pigment should never
harangue the artist. You're forgetting that there isn't really such a color as white. The pointilists knew how
to stimulate white with alternating dots of primary colors long before the scientists learned to spin the
same colors on a disc. And those old masters could even make white from just two colors: a primary and
its complementary color. Your green dress is our primary; Violet's purple dress is its complementary.
Funny, mix 'em as pigments into a homogeneous mass, and you get brown. But daub 'em on the canvas
side by side, stand back the right distance, and they blend into white. All you have to do is hold Vi's
dress at arm's length, at your side, with a strip of rosebuds and green leaves looking out between, and
you'll have that white rose you came here in search of."

She demurred: "But the angle of visual interruption won't be small enough to blend the colors into white,
even if the police don't come any nearer than the archway. The eye sees two objects as one only when
the visual angle between the two is less than sixty seconds of arc."
"That old canard doesn't apply too strictly to colors. The artist relies more on the suggestibility of the
mind rather than on the mechanical limitations of the retina. Admittedly, if our lean-jawed friends stared in
your direction for more than a fraction of a second, they'd see you not as a whitish blur, but as a woman
in green holding out a mass of something purple. But they aren't going to give your section of the park
more than a passing glance." He pointed past the fountain toward the opposite horn of the semi-circular
path. "I'm going to stand over there, and the instant someone sticks his head in through the archway, I'm
going to start walking. Now, as every artist knows, normal people in western cultures absorb pictures
from left to right, because they're levo-dextro readers. So our agent's first glance will be toward you, and
then his attention will be momentarily distracted by the fountain in the center. And before he can get back
to you, I'll start walking, and his eyes will have to come on to me. His attentive transition, of course, must
be sweeping and imperative, yet so smooth, so subtle, that he will suspect no control. Something like