Notes on colour

Colour is at the root of reality.

– Georges Seurat –


Every human experience is coloured. 

Colours are “conceptually primitive”.  It is a part of human nature, part of our genetic code, to perceive the world in the way that we do, differentiating between light and dark.  As we have evolved on a planet that has regular divisions between night and day and the four seasons, our mental and physical faculties have developed to be sensitive to these changes.  Not only does human vision depend on colour for spatial differentiation, colour depends on human vision to experience it.

And still, the process is mysterious.  It is not just a matter of dividing light into discrete wavelengths.  People will often disagree about the nature of a colour – for example, whether a particular shade is orange or red.  Measuring out a quantity of light of a certain wavelength is not enough to predict that someone will report seeing a certain colour.  The viewing experience is, at least in part, subjective.    What occurs between the moment that light rays strike the retina and the moment of colour cognition remains a mystery. 

It is one of the oldest philosophical questions:  how does one know that a colour elicits the same experience in someone else?  In other words, how do I know that the blue that I see looks blue, in the same way, to you?  The problem may be irresolvable.  We shall never know whether colours appear the same to everyone because we only have access to our own individual experiences. 

Colour differentiation does not admit of mathematical quantification and there is no scientific naming system.  Instead, we use a fluid terminology that continues to evolve.  Pigment manufacturers have regimented the vernacular to a certain extent, but it is always a matter of personal judgment, for instance, whether a particular shade of red is properly called “scarlet” or “orange”. 

That colour is conceptually primitive requires that the application of colour terminology be ostensive only.  “Blue” is just a word.  The colour blue does not exhibit any essential “blueness”.   One can only hope that the other person sees the blue that you see when you are pointing and saying “blue”.   It is just an arbitrary name we give to blue, a spatial experience we all seem to share similarly.  This ostensive nature of colour naming results in most colour terms being named after already named objects in the world, such as orange, ruby, or cerulean.  Only the most fundamental colours, such as white, black, and the primaries, are named independently of the objects they adorn.

Every culture has its own colour lore.  Ancient priests, poets, and philosophers used the shades of the spectrum to explain, describe, and enchant.  Colour has significance in psychology, philosophy, aesthetics, physiology, politics, history, art, literature, sociology, and religion.  It so pervades every aspect of human existence that we often take colour for granted.  The nature of the universe radiates directly into our eyes but we cannot see behind the rainbow mask. 

Colour is said to be connected to the infinite harmony and design of the universe.  Each planet in the solar system is associated with a particular hue.  Each note in the musical scale suggests a colour, every musical instrument in the orchestra a certain shade.  Humans emit electro-magnetic auras of various colours denoting various physiological and psychological states.  Alchemists linked a succession of colours to the various transformations leading to the Philosopher’s stone. 

In the modern era, the use of colour, even for aesthetic purposes, has fallen out of favour.  Colour is dismissed as decorative, unanalyzable, emotional, and irrational; for children, not for adults.  Importance is given instead to that which can be measured and quantified, like geometry and math.  But this is misguided.  It is colour itself that gives rise to form, and hence, to geometry.

Modern science has resorted to clumsy names such as “grayish, yellowish, pink” to categorize colour, relying on complex number systems to denote to tint, tone, and shade.  Patricia Sloane argues against this in her book The Visual Nature of Colour.  Such attempts at containment choke the very essence out of the colour.  She writes,

I can muster no enthusiasm for a rational colour naming system if, without improvement in clarity, it purges language of the poetry of such names as vermilion, viridian, cerulean, and turquoise.  Clear or not, these mellifluous words are a pleasure to use, as “grayish, yellowish pink” are not.  They guide using the right direction, toward the love of color that inspires us to observe and learn about it.  (p.23)

There is a great deal of poetry in colour terminology and lore.  Goethe published a fourteen hundred page treatise on colour in 1810.  His theory contrasts with Isaac Newton’s strictly scientific account found in Opticks, published one hundred years earlier.  Goethe insists that colour perception takes place on both subjective and objective levels.  He describes a phenomenon called the “apercu”, an “immediate, intuitive flash insight that is all-revealing”.  Most people are familiar with this gestalt experience, but it is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to express.  Goethe writes,

…every color produces a distinct impression on the mind, and this addresses at once the eye and feelings.  Hence it follows that color may be employed for certain sensual, moral, and aesthetic ends.

Such an application, coinciding entirely with Nature, might be called symbolical, since the color is employed in conformity with its effect, and would at once express its meaning. (p. 189)

I aim to get at the essence of these twenty three colours through symbolism and poetic expression, to achieve a distillation through words.  My hope is that they might one day harmonize with visual expressions of colour (painting), geometric form (drawing), dance, drama, film, musical expressions and perhaps even sensual expressions of smell and touch.