Color permeates our daily lives. Some people, who vividly recall their dreams, also report dreaming in color. We use it liberally in our society now, almost to the point of taking it for granted. (Personally, I think that's why humans worked so hard to develop fluorescent colors.) We can get a *wide* variety of color in our art materials now, too. As an example, Copic markers come in four sets of 72 colors. Prismacolor markers come in a set of 156. The monitors we look at, these days, have 32 bit color, or 16,777,216 colors! And your HD TV? It's got over a billion colors. A BILLION! That's a 1 with 9 zeros behind it!
Truly, we're spoiled with the amount of color in our lives, considering that, historically, if you had a brightly colored anything (that wasn't "natural" colors like greens, browns, and greys), you cherished it and passed it on to your kids. Color had a big impact on what a family heirloom was and, unless you were of the elite classes, your family only had a handful of those colored items.
Basically, we're trying to bring the colors our eyes see to a tangible medium that we can pass on from generation to generation. Can you paint fireworks, as your eyes see them, with just 156 colors? How about 16,777,216 colors? What about a billion colors? Sadly, not even a high definition TV can match what our eyes see. But that's our goal: to match and capture what our eyes see, so we can share our true perceptions of the world around us with others.
Resources:
http://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/
http://www.williamsclass.com/ElectiveClassArt/ArtElementNotes.htm
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