Hi, i am kind of new to opencv , could somebody help me about the matrix imread() returns , both color and grayscale , all i am seeing is 3x3 matrix?

I want to know which row is for the red channel which column for blue. I am confused? thanks for the help

def bw_image_array(self):  #convert black and white image into array of matrix
    image = cv.imread('{}'.format(self.Image),cv.IMREAD_GRAYSCALE)
    return image
def color_image_array(self): 
    image = cv.imread('{}'.format(self.Image),cv.IMREAD_COLOR)
    return image

image1 = picture_to_ascii('python\doodles\photo.jpg')