Each individual color is a universe in itself. JOHANNES ITTEN
I register color first. Before form, before faces. Like most artists, I formally studied color theory, read Josef Albers and Johannes Itten, and played with paint chips. However, the natural world has always been my best teacher, both on the canvas and in designing my home and gardens.
WHY WE RESPOND TO CERTAIN COLORS
When I had a studio showroom, I sold textiles, paper goods, and art. I fielded a lot of questions about color and noticed how ‘brighter’ colors made many people flat-out anxious. The first principle to understanding color is that it’s a language and grasping any language needs patience, vocabulary, and basic grammar. Once you learn to navigate color, your world expands.
I used to think that geography and childhood environment determined color preferences. Southern studio visitors favored bright colors and those from New England and California preferred neutrals. But when I started researching chromophobia (a legitimate phobia and a real word), I stumbled onto another explanation for our color preferences. The writer Carolyn Purnell explores the historical context of color in Color, Chromophobia, and Colonialism: Some Historical Thoughts:
"In England, contemporaries often called Indian textiles “rags” or “trash” and scorned their bright colors, and in Europe more generally, bright colors were taken as a sign of degeneracy and inferiority. The German writer Goethe famously stated that “Men in a state of nature, uncivilized nations and children, have a great fondness for colors in their utmost brightness,” whereas “people of refinement'' avoid vivid colors (or what he called “pathological colors”). In short, a love of bright color marked one as mercurial, uncivilized, as not possessing taste, as being foreign or other. Color represented the “mythical savage state out of which civilization, the nobility of the human spirit, slowly, heroically, has lifted itself — but back into which it could always slide”.
Alma White @Smithsonian American Art Museum
I know my chromophilia (yes that’s a word too) stems from living in a Central American country when I was young, absorbing the Latin celebration of color and pattern. My Texan mother loved colors as well but shied away from the saturated reds and pinks that dominate my interior. Purnell continues:
"According to Batchelor, prejudice against color “masks a fear: a fear of contamination and corruption by something that is unknown or appears unknowable,” and the highly minimal, white spaces of contemporary architecture mark an attempt to rationalize and strictly limit an interior, to stop its merging with the world outside. The “hollow, whited chamber, scraped clean, cleared of any evidence of the grotesque embarrassments of an actual life. No smells, no noises, no colour; no changing from one state to another and the uncertainty that comes wit.”
According to Purnell our color choices are far from arbitrary and may stem from archaic associations, colonization, environmental control, and desire for higher status.
COLOR THEORY
If you’d like to broaden your color understanding, start by expanding your attention to individual hues. Red is not just red, but vermillion, cadmium red light, scarlet, and burnt red. Yellow ranges from sunshine to the pale yellow of a flower’s statement. And blue is bouncing everywhere around us in a myriad of shades. But that is just the beginning. The secondary colors are the offspring of the primaries. Just put equal parts of two primary colors together and you get a secondary: blue and red make purple; red and yellow make orange; yellow and blue make green. When you combine primary and secondary colors, you arrive at a range of tertiary colors. Complimentary colors are the opposite colors on the color wheel. When paired, they intensify each other.
Lee Krasner Museum of Fine Arts Houston
THE YEAR IN COLOR Two years ago I overheard two people in a restaurant bemoaning the lack of color in our high alpine winter landscape and they gave me an idea. All year I kept a daily color journal to document the landscape palette from season to season. Snow isn’t just a hard white after all – there are blues, grays, a spot of blood from a hawk kill, or churned-up earth from a burrowing animal. There is always color if we choose to see it –even in winter- the rocks on my dog walk, the anchor ice on a bluebird day, the lichen on the gambel oak, the deep purple-reddish bark of a chokecherry bush, or the brightly colored feathers congregating at my birdfeeder. By mapping the seasons with daily color notes I gained a new appreciation of my Rocky Mountain landscape. Any invitation to slow down and take note of what we take for granted is a good thing. RESOURCES Color: A Workshop for Artists and Designers by David Hornung The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Findlay Nature's Palette: A Color Reference System from the Natural World by Patrick Baty Lorene Edwards Forkner — a wonderful Substack —and her book A Handmade Garden. And a recent Substack find: Color Stories
Most of us are familiar with Sir Isaac Newton’s discoveries about color and light. He was the first to record that the allocation of colors through a lit prism determines the color spectrum. He also gave us the color wheel. Newton’s wheel illustrates the visible light spectrum. Simply put, these are the discernable colors to the naked human eye, color blindness aside. If you want to do a deep dive into the science behind color, here is an excellent source.
HUE, SATURATION, VALUE
Gauging color goes well beyond understanding the color wheel. Next, you need to understand the qualities of hue, saturation, and value. Hue is easy – it’s the actual color. Saturation refers to color purity –the closer the color resembles the light and quality in the spectrum, the more saturated it is. For example, in watercolor, building up layers with glazes of the same hue deepens the saturation. Value is dictated by the lightness and darkness of a color. The easiest way to understand this concept is to take one of your colorful smartphone photos and switch it to black-and-white mode. This strips the image of hue and saturation and allows you to determine the value.
Hilma af Klint @ Hilma af Klint Foundation
Understanding color helps you better read the natural world, and further appreciate a piece of fine or decorative art, a well-designed interior, or eye-popping cinematography.