A color is not only a color...

Colors aren’t only reflected light getting into our eyes: they influence our mood, they also have different meanings determined by cultural, psychological and subjective factors… fron now on, we’ll analyse each one of these.

We tend to paint our room’s walls with cold and light colors to improve our rest. Take the opposite example, if we painted our room red, we’d find it more difficult to fall asleep… Hot water is represented by the color red; cold one by blue.  In anatomy’s ilustrations, arteries are colored red while veins are blue. Same happens with traffic signs.

Try this: use blue food coloring on rice or cookies. I bet people will feel reluctant to have a taste of them. Why does this happen? Because blue isn’t originary from the products we usually use for meals and that makes us suspicious.

Most of these facts are a result of the characteristics of each color (black equals darkness, for example), but also of the psychological connotations and symbolisms of each culture and its traditions (while in West black means death and night, in the East, white is used for funerals).

Cimabue, Virgin
enthroned with Angels,
1270

The choice of colors in art, fashion and design, isn’t done randomly and mostly is determined by the influence of the subjective dimension of color.

In the Middle Ages, when almost everybody was illiterate, faith and religion was spread through images and colors were set in a symbolic way so that we could identify the figures in it easily. Virgin Mary used to wear a red dress and a blue cape, sky will always be blue and Heaven and Paradise green. Red was also used for martyrs and blood. Kings wore purple…, etc. Later, artists will try to represent the color’s object (which is named ‘local color’) but the symbolic use of color will often appear throughout the history of Art (Van Gogh, Gauguin, Munch…)

Soon, we will analyse the effects and subjective connotations of the color red.

Next week we will talk about the Jacques-Louis David’s painting The dead of Marat.

cristinadelrosso.com // cristinadelrosso.artproject@gmail.com

Sources: Nerdinger, W., Elemente künstlerischer Gestaltung. München, Martin Lurz, 1986

Welsch, N.-Liebmann,C.Chr., Farben, München, Elsevier, 2004

Translation: Lorenzo Vigo
Picture of blue rice: Cristina del Rosso

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