I would be easy to assume that artist Concetta Antico is using artistic licence by looking at the vivid array of colour contained in her paintings. The yellow crest on her cockatoo has hints of green and blue, while the trunks of her eucalyptus trees are hued with violet and mauve.
Antico says that it is not an artistic licence and that it is an affectation. If it's a pink flower and you suddenly see some blue or lilac, I actually saw that.
Antico has a fourth colour receptor in her eye which is different to the standard three. Cone cells have the ability to distinguish around one million different colors, but the ability to see 100 million is not available to tetrachromats.
Antico says he didn't know he was not experiencing the world like other people. The world was very colorful for me. You don't know you're a zebra unless you're not a zebra.
Antico says she was a little bit out of the box as a child, dying her hair with bright colors and choosing emerald-green carpet and black and lime green curtains for her bedroom. She would often disappear for an entire day into the land around a nearby golf course.
I always felt like I was in a very magical world. It was like everything was different for me. I was always looking into nature and trying to see more detail, because I would see so much more. For me, seeing a leaf or a flower was like a compulsion to really understand it, see it, and spend a lot of time on it. I wanted to portray everything I was seeing.
After finishing university, Antico moved to the United States, where she became an artist and art teacher.
Her diagnosis came in 2012 when one of her students sent her a scientific paper that speculated about what Antico had. When Antico discovered her daughter was colour-blind, she told her she would teach her how to see colour.
Within 24 hours, Antico sent my saliva to Washington, DC, where it was confirmed that she had a genetic abnormality.
The University of California scientist who studied Antico said that it is not enough to have the gene alone, but that it is a necessary condition. If the environment demands that you do something, the genes kick in.
She realized she saw the world differently than others. If they say no, I'd like to look a little closer.
Antico was able to make sense of her childhood home after learning that her mother was also likely to be a tetrachromat. Stuff that nobody was doing, and her house was unusual.
Antico says that having super vision brings her enormous happiness. How could you be unhappy in this world? Just sit in the park. Go and look at a bush or tree. You can't not appreciate how great it is.
Many man-made environments, such as a large shopping centre with fluorescent lighting, have the opposite effect of the natural world. I don't like going into those types of buildings unless I have to. There is a difference between looking at a row of trees and looking at a row of groceries. It is ugly and the lights are garish. It makes me sad.
Antico wants to produce more work in these final decades of his life than he did before, so he is teaching less and painting more.
I'm going to keep painting. I want to describe what I'm seeing in nature because it's a way to see things that other people aren't seeing.
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