The Art of color
Color is emotion, language, sensation — a visual contact with the World around us! After all, 90% of the information we receive comes directly through our eyes.
Can one learn to perceive color consciously, to speak through color?
Yes, one can! Of course, there are shared notions of colors and of the feelings and responses they evoke. Yet there are also our personal preferences, our vision, the feelings stirred by one color or another. And it is precisely these that we will try to uncover and bring to light.
There are no beautiful or ugly colors, no bad or good ones; everything depends on their combinations, on a person’s temperament, on how we interpret them for ourselves.
So we come to the heart of the matter: color associations.
I invite you to try a practical exercise: express paired emotions and concepts through color alone (abstractly).
I invite you to try a practical exercise: express paired emotions and concepts through color alone (abstractly).
On an A3 sheet, one pair each:
young–mature
calm–active
sweet–salty
light–heavy
cheerful–melancholy
dry–wet
bitter–sour
calm–active
sweet–salty
light–heavy
cheerful–melancholy
dry–wet
bitter–sour
You may add your own pairs to the list!
It is best to use acrylic or watercolor; techniques may vary: brushes, palette knife, strokes, drops, and so on. The main thing is that everything should serve the image you create.
This is deeply liberating: it engages intuition and eases tension.
It is also useful to reverse the exercise: choose a particular shade of color and give it as many verbal characteristics and associations as you can!
You can learn more about the author of this article and her work here: http://katerinart.com/