Primary Colors (Anonymous)

We're taught growing up (or at least we are in the USA - maybe we're the only idiots) that red, yellow and blue are the primary colors - that all secondary and tertiary colors can be mixed from them. We're shown a color wheel, which lays out how everything interacts, and all the colors seem to be there.

Everything seemed in order until one morning a month or two ago, I woke up and wanted to paint a piece with the scheme black, yellow and magenta. I dug around in my box of paints, which is short on fancy colors but has plenty of red, yellow, blue, black and white. I mixed and mixed and mixed and... well, magenta never materialized.

Granted, light and pigment primaries are a yin and yang, but I never gave any real thought to print primaries when painting - inkjet printers and all other four-pass process systems (magazines, product packaging, etc.) use magenta, yellow, cyan and black ink to create all other output colours.

Primary colors, by definition, 1) cannot be mixed from any other colors and 2) can be mixed to create all other colors. Magenta is a pure hue which must be bought, and can then be mixed with yellow to create red. Cyan is a pure hue which can be mixed with magenta to create "primary" blue.

What I'm driving at here is obvious, and I want to know if I'm going crazy or if I just overlooked something that's old news to everyone else. I'm in my twenties and I've only once heard someone else agree that magenta, rather than red, is the primary. As a lifelong artist who is continually experimenting at home and has taken (paid a lot for) a brazillian art classes (including color theory more than once), the notion that red is not a primary color drops the bottom out of my understanding of color like a soggy cardboard box. So much for the Holy Trinity.

This is probably obvious to anyone in the professional printing business, but it should be just as obvious to someone working solely in pigments. If I'm not going crazy here, then I think the red-yellow-blue dogma is a serious misinformation. Color forms the foundation for so many other disciplines and we're so conclusively taught to start at red, yellow and blue. I don't want more aspiring artists growing up thinking that, too.

I don't sense I'm going to get very far with this crusade. Maybe I'll just jump back on the grammar-nazi horse.