‘I’m really just high on life and beauty’: the woman who can see 100 million colours
it would be easy to look at the vivid array of colour contained in the paintings of artist Concetta Antico and assume she is using artistic licence. The trunks of her eucalyptus trees are hued with violet and mauve; the yellow crest on her cockatoo has hints of green and blue; the hypercolour of a garden landscape looks almost psychedelic.To get more news about
, you can visit our official website.
It’s not just an affectation and it’s not artistic licence,” says Antico. “I’m actually painting exactly what I see. If it’s a pink flower and then all of a sudden you see a bit of lilac or blue, I actually saw that.”
Antico is a tetrachromat, which means she has a fourth colour receptor in her retina compared with the standard three which most people have. While those of us with three of these receptors – called cone cells – have the ability to distinguish around one million different colours, tetrachromats see an estimated 100 million.
Until 10 years ago, Antico says, “I didn’t know I was not experiencing the world like other people were. For me, the world was just really very colourful. It’s kind of like, you don’t know you’re a zebra unless you’re not a zebra.”
As a child growing up in Sydney, Antico says she was always “a little bit out of the box” – dying her hair with bright colours and choosing emerald-green carpet and black and lime green curtains for her bedroom. Fascinated with nature, she’d often disappear for an entire day into the land around a nearby golf course.
“I always felt like I was living in a very magical world. I know children say that, but for me, it was like everything was hyper-wonderful, hyper-different. I was always exploring into nature, delving and trying to see the intricacies, because I’d see so much more detail in everything. Someone else might look at a leaf or a petal on a flower, but for me, it was like a compulsion to really understand it, really see it, and sometimes spend a lot of time on it. And I just wanted to paint and portray everything that I was seeing.”After finishing university, Antico moved to the United States, where she became an artist and art teacher in San Diego, developing her unique style of colourful landscapes and flora and fauna.
Her diagnosis didn’t come until 2012, when one of her students, a neurologist, emailed her a scientific paper about tetrachromacy, speculating that this could be what Antico had. A few months earlier, Antico had discovered her daughter was colour-blind (“I told her she was fine, she was just different and special and amazing and I’d teach her how to see colour anyway”) and when she opened the article one of the first things she read was that women who have potential for tetrachromacy also have potential to create a colour-blind female offspring.
Antico emailed the scientists who wrote the paper and “within 24 hours, I was sending my saliva up to Washington” where testing confirmed she had the genetic mutation responsible for tetrachromacy.
According to Dr Kimberly Jameson, a University of California scientist who has studied Antico, just having the gene – which around 15% of women have – is not alone sufficient to be a tetrachromat, but it’s a necessary condition. “In Concetta’s case … one thing we believe is that because she’s been painting sort of continuously since the age of seven years old, she has really enlisted this extra potential and used it. This is how genetics works: it gives you the potential to do things and if the environment demands that you do that thing, then the genes kick in.”
