Thinking About Color

"I am as curious about color as one would be visiting a new country, because I have never concentrated so closely on color expression.  Up to now I have waited at the gates of the temple."
Henri Matisse
French Fauvist Painter and Sculptor







Last Sunday I was in Cambridge to check on my oldest son's condo and to meet up with my "wandering son" at his coffee shoppe.  While I was sitting in the 1369, I thought that it might be a good opportunity to drop by Pearl Art, my favorite art supply house in downtown Central Square.  On Gather I had joined the Art Journal Collaboration Project and as yet hadn't started doing anything with it.  Maybe if I got some new supplies, it would edge me on to actually starting something.  On my way to Pearl, I got sidetracked looking at all the wall murals in and around the Square.  The murals are vibrant with color and make Central Square a warm and inviting community...a community where various ethnic groups from around the world make their home.








As I was walking around Pearl Art Supply, I was immediately drawn to various colorful displays of paper, writing utensils, threads, etc. Ummm...our world is full of color.  I wonder if I might write an article on the concept of "color"?  Perhaps I should take a few pictures...just in case, I thought.  As I strolled around shooting first this and then that, several people asked what I was doing.  I casually told them that I wrote a blog (gee, I hate that word...but I hate the term blogger even worst!) on Gather and that I thought I might write an article on the psychology of color.  Afterall, I explained, color and our reaction to it is almost instantaneous and plays a profound impact on the choices we make everyday.  Whether we are selecting a paint to color our walls, buying a car or selecting clothes that best agree with our coloring we are reacting to color and the personal association we have with that particular color.  Throughout history much has been written about "color" I found in my research...philosophers, painters, physicists, interior decorators and web designers all have explored the concept of color. 

"I want to know one thing.  What is color?"
Pablo Picasso
Spanish Cubist Painter and Sculptor





"The world is your kaleidoscope, and the varying combinations of colors which at every succeeding moment it presents to you are the exquisitely adjusted pictures of your ever-moving thoughts."
James Edward Allen
American Artist
As a Man Thinketh Ch. 2 Effect of Thought on Circumstances

Over the past week I have spent an incredible amount of time on the web exploring this concept.  At times I have been overwhelmed with all the material that has been written.  I have waded through cultural history and read color theories from Pythagoras, Aristotle and Plato to Goethe and Michel Eugene Chevreul. My mind has been swimming in a pool of color.  What once seemed a simple topic to write about has become like life, a Pandora's box.





"Color is but a sensation and has no existence outside the nervous system of living beings."
Nicholas Ogden Rood
American physicist

Are we to believe the physicists as they attempt to explain color empirically ... color is just taking the light of the sun, directing it through a prism and then, bending the resultant spectrum into a circle.  Is color only a perceptual characteristic of light described by a color name?  I understand color is light, and that light is composed of many colors - those that we see being the colors of the visual spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet.  Equally, I understand that objects absorb certain wavelengths and reflect others back to the viewer and that we perceive these wavelengths as color.  But some how or another, is this a distortion that conforms with our own physiology?  By doing this, are we creating a closed environment only to facilitate the imposition of our own meaning of the world?






"Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet."
Paul Klee
Swiss Expressionist Painter

It seems to me that the physics of light and colour does play a crucial role in Mankind's search for knowledge.  I believe by studying the light that falls on earth, we can find answers to the most fundamental of all questions: namely, the nature and origins of the known universe.

But equally, through our habitual imposition of order upon a world we would otherwise perceive as random, do we not run the risk of distorting our vision.  What we perceive as chaos may very well be an illusion.   The desire of physicists to discover a supreme order may serve only to reassure us in our incomprehension than provide a firm and logical structure for our discoveries.  Ultimately, do they not only succeed in bringing disruption to the unity and harmony that surrounds us?



"Color!  What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams."
Paul Gaugin
French Post-Impressionist Painter

In mankind's obsession with scientific analysis, these color systems become a symbol.  Seen as a whole, and despite their individual shortcomings, these systems that have been devised over the ages do contain some truths and they do allow us to trace the changing views of civilization and culture.  But they also show us how we can lose ourselves in the closeness of inspection and analysis.  Without physics, we can attain no insight into the nature of the universe; but do we at the same time lose sight of other truths? 




It may be wiser, in the end, to view these color systems as a game - just so many pieces in a puzzle.  Each can be confusing, decorative or whimsical; we should accept them as so, in the same way as we should, perhaps, our world as the most complete and perfect system of them all.

Our world and the distant, scattered beauty of the universe seem to me in the end, unwilling to yield all their secrets to the onslaught of science.  Nevertheless, science has assumed that it alone can nurture the human soul, and has declared itself independent.  Modern society's belief in self-redemption as creative faith has been described as the real delusion of our secularised age, and at the same time the declaration of all it's failures.  Is it now science, as the spearhead of human endeavor, which represents that delusion?  Just a thought I have been pondering.