Weekly Assignment 5 - Colour of the mind

For the past centuries in history, people have sought out to find the true meaning of colour.

The first person to study the colour optics was Isaac Newton, a physicist and mathematician in 17^th century. His belief of colour was that we perceive colour purely from the basis of scientific and mathematical background. Long after Newton’s belief, came an opposing believer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a German writer and a poet. (Gage, J. (1993). Colours of the Mind in Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction P.201) He believed that colour is something that human perceives internally, not externally; Newton belief. He believed that colour is perceived differently with different people, that there are psychological and emotional reasoning behind how we perceive colour. Whereas Newton, who trusted in sensation of eye, believed that colour is something that is depicted purely on the basis of how the human eye is formed (science).

Goethe’s belief in later period influenced artists such as Turner and Runge. Similar to Goethe, these artists believed that colour should have symbolical meaning in them. This resulted in impressionism, a style of art where often depiction of “real experience” was the main purpose. This created style of painting called optical mixing, where a lot of dots are being used to express how the eye perceives colors that abut or overlay each other to give out more vitality in paintings. Then came post-impressionism. Post-impressionists believed that art was lacking subjectivity and wanted to depict feeling rather than representation of a scene. Often symbolical meanings are used in post-impressionism paintings and abstract depictions in colours can be defined as most dominant sources.

Such impressionistic values are shown in “His vision of the cafe at Arles”, by Van Gogh. He used colours that clash to another to express the feeling of what he has experienced. These clashing of colours help to depict “terrible passions of humanity”;red, green and yellow appear rather disgusting. (Gage, J. (1993). Colours of the Mind in Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction P.196)