We can determine the temperature outside, by looking at the color of the sky. We can tell a person's general health, dangerous creatures, fire, and the freshness of food, by color.

Nature teaches us all about how color fades with distance, and about color blending and bleeding (an example is yellow and blue side by side, giving the appearance of a green stripe in between). We notice that the brightness and size of a spot of color is influenced by its surroundings.

We are so in love with color, that we take every possible opportunity to use it. Colors have equivalent psychological impacts on us. We even associate human qualities and emotions with various colors and they become symbolic.

" Red - energy, sexuality, passion
  Orange - friendly, cheerful, gregarious, and articulate
  Yellow - success, prosperity, achievement, wealth
  Green - love, nurturing, caring
  Indigo - intuition, transcendence, higher self
  Violet - nobility, royalty, spirituality
  Black - mystery, sophistication, authority
  White - purity, innocence, incandescence, unity" (216)
  The Color Collective - keynote speaker - Virginia A. Sullivan

 

"The chief aim of color should be to serve expression as well as possible. I put down my colors without a preconceived plan... I discover the quality of colors in purely an instinctive way. To paint an autumn landscape I will not try to remember what colors suit this season, I will be inspired only by the sensation that the season gives me; the icy clearness of the sour blue sky will express the season just as well as the tonalities of the leaves." (217)
Henri Matisse "Notes of a Painter" 1908




"While form is absolute, so that you can say at the moment you draw any line that it is either right or wrong, colour is wholly relative. Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch that you add in other places; so that what was warm a minute ago, becomes cold when you have put a hotter color in another place, and what was in harmony when you left it, becomes discordant as you set other colors beside it; so that every touch must be laid, not with a view to its effect at the time, but with a view to its effect in futurity, the result upon it of all that is afterwards to be done being previously considered. You may easily understand that, this being so, nothing but the devotion of life, and great genius besides, can make a colourist." (218)
Ruskin




The mental set which is knowledgeable of how colors effect each other is not a childlike endeavour. It also "demands a willingness to use a pigment which in isolation still looks unlike the area to be matched in order that it may look like it in the end." (219) E.H. Gombrich




216. Sunday, January 13, 1991, North Shore News, Vancouver, Canada
217. Hershel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, (Berkeley and L.A., Cal., University of California Press, 1968) p. 134
218. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, (Princeton, N.J., U.S.A., Princeton University Press, 1972), p.p. 308, 309
219. ibid. p.310