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I picked up the Wilcox book some time ago -- the sticker indicates I didn't pay full price for it. I must have thought it interesting at the time, but I can't discern the country of purchase. I actually found it quite fascinating, but I never settled it down enough to use it in practice.
I suppose that was because even the title was counter-intuitive. Whatever the submolecular physics suggest, when you mix a blue and a yellow on your palette, you DO in fact get green, and there's no practical use in being told that you're being tricked by optics and that the green you're seeing isn't green. Wilcox reminds us that yellow is optically emitted from elements that reject, not elements that absorb, yellow. Okay, but ... But mix a red and yellow and you DO get orange. [Michael just described in his formula something he called yellow-red, and then said it was cad orange, and I wondered why he hadn't said orange in the first place -- then he posted his Munsell color wheel and I saw that the "Orange" label isn't on it. It does get complicated.] Maybe you don't get the green or orange you want straightaway, depending on which blue and yellow, which red and yellow, you started with. But I can discern little practical use when painting in saying that what I'm seeing isn't what I'm seeing. "It's a worry."
Finally, I felt like I was trying to apply Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" to a drive in Taipei traffic. It may work in the lab, but try to explain it in Chinese to Taipei police at the scene of the accident. Wilcox's explication began to feel like I had asked a physicist to help me with my golf swing. It could be done, I suppose -- but surely there's gotta be something else. (Sure, I want Tiger's winnings, if not his golf swing. Okay, the swing, too, but not without the dough.)
I'm not at all familiar with the Wilcox paints. In fact, I've been in a lot of venues throughout the world, over a long time, and I've never even seen those paints offered, so maybe they didn't take off, or maybe they're only available from the website. But it doesn't necessarily bother me that an advocate of a system is also selling a product that meets the needs of that system.
I know that I'm ultimately responsible for doing the homework. I just found Wilcox's class to be one I tended to skip more than others.
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