The best illustration for colour I've ever come across. Thanks to Michael Maggs at Wikimedia Commons for this brilliant photo. It holds the key to all my experiences and relations with colour. It's the kind of picture I'd have treasured as a child and stored in my special box in layers of light blue cotton wool.
Colours are what I remember best from my earliest encounters with places and houses.
GREEN is the first colour I have distinct memories of.
The greens of my grandmothers garden. I was small and the garden seemed vast and the green lawn endless with old and young fruit trees in different shades of green. Green dominated the flower beds with heavy headed peonies and rows of berry bushes offered a drier, spicier green. Being small brought me close to this intimate lushness. I could pass just beneath the dense foliage of the lilacs, into a hidden world of dark and earthy green. Unseen from the outside. I could crawl in below the fragrant leaves of the red currants to find wild strawberries in the soft green grass never reached by the lawn mover.
Later I climbed trees. Best were the tall birch trees flanking the allé from my grandparent's house to the main road. Two rows of mature, white stemmed birch trees. Each tree differently equipped with branches fit for either sitting or stretching out; I ranked the trees according to how climbable and comfortable they were. I would sit hidden, high up in a tree for hours, reading, behind a green filter of soft leaves. I thought I could smell the green light; in this atmosphere of chlorophyll even the light seemed to have a fragrant quality. Today, whenever I dress in green, I feel intensely well.
My next significant colour experience was with white. The grandparent's big house was white. A dragon style inspired "Sveitser-villa"; a white painted wooden house with carved details. (Like this). The bed room I slept in was white - the light lace curtains were white - the bed linen was white. Some mornings the pale northern sunlight would shine in through the carved white veranda and I would wake up to a shimmering white-in-white pattern on my bed.
Again
I felt embalmed in colour, the light was white rather than bright. I
wish I could paint the memory of being in that white light.
The essence of my memory has been beautifully captured, though not by me, but by the Norwegian artist Ida Lorentzen. An esteemed painter of interiors, light and space.
Her interior above; Pastel "Interior from Nyfossum", came to my knowledge after I started writing this. Do look up the links on her website as they will take you to pictures more typical of her work. Photo courtesy of Ida Lorentzen.
Blue is next on my list. Whereas my memories of green and white stem from my first four years, my attraction to blue came later. Obviously from a more verbal stage, because my memories of blue colours are related to words more than feelings. Skye blue, powder blue, angel blue, Lavender blue, Hepatica blue, aquamarine. Blue words - blueberry blue - these words stir up visions more than emotions. Scenes and objects, but also fragrance. Still, certain sky blue colours conjures up a whole array of emotions and scenes, and I feel a surge of hope, or anticipation, or optimism, maybe? It's particularly strong when I see a certain dotted, blue sky typical for Renee Magritte; in my mind I call it "angel blue".
White, green, blue - why not red? These three colours meant something to me long before I recognised colour as a concept. Why do I feel so strongly about them, and why particularly the green and white? Naturally, it occurs to me that Norway has two dominating seasons; white winter and a very green summer. The sky looks blue (sometimes). But that can't explain it? Yet, I have no similar memories of red and yellow. One memory of red shoes comes to mind, though. But hey, that's shoes! Who doesn't remember red shoes? Of course, the intensity of these memories can easily be attributed to other sensory experiences from sources like light, smell or temperature. Most of us are sensitive to sound or smell, to a degree that a certain smell or a piece of music may bring back memories, good and bad. I guess one could say I have a very strong affinity to colour. Accordingly, when seeing a certain green I should have this childhood memory popping up? But I don't! Strangely, it's thinking the word "green", that vividly brings it back - the light and smell and the whole scene. Merely seeing green colours does not have the same effect.
I had to find out more - the internet is wonderful. How we relate to colour interests me on all levels. How we sense them, see them, use them and remember them and depend on them.
Colour has intrigued various sciences for different reasons. The study of colour as a phenomenon is far from new. Newton's colour theories "Opticks" 1704, based on the physics of light and prisms, has been an important stepping stone for further studies. One hundred years later Goethe challenged Newton's ideas with his "Theory of Colors" 1810.
New and interesting research is constantly added from very different angles. So much, I cannot even begin to cover it, but check the links below. To mention some; biophysics deal with colour vision and wavelength. Studies in neurobiology and psychology look at vision, perception and cognition in relation to colour stimuli and the brain. Colour is a source of interest in philosophy and anthropology as well. And some linguists, like Paul Kay, study colour because it helps them testing theories like "linguistic relativity". Paul Kay was kind enough to correct the following blue text so it's up to date with the latest research. Thank you P.K.!
It may not be the logical place to start, but since I'm already so caught up in words, I've chosen the linguistic field of research. Maybe it can shed some light on why colour has such a strong hold on me.
Here's a little taste of what I've picked up.... :
We naturally perceive the colours around us from an early age, apparently in much the same way in all cultures (at least in the ones studied). In order to communicate that we not only perceive colours, but also distinguish one from another, we have to be taught to identify colours by the names, or terms, common to our language. How our native language relates to colour is a different story; It's the number of colours that we put a name to that varies across languages.
Some may have as few as two terms; one that covers black plus the cool colours including all shades of green and blue, and one term for light plus the warm colours, including red, orange and yellow.
Languages with three terms usually retain the black plus cool term. Then the remaining colours are divided into a white or light term and a third warm term that includes red, orange and yellow. Languages with four terms most often divide the black plus cool term into a “black” term (that can include brown or purple or both) and a green-or-blue term. Languages with five terms almost always have terms for black, white, red, yellow and green-or-blue. Most of the languages of the world don’t have separate simple words for green and blue. Six term languages almost invariably have simple words for the colours black, white, red, yellow, green and blue, which are called the Hering opponent colours after the work of the great German physiologist K.E.K. Hering.
Modern researchers have termed these six colours "universal focal colours". Universal, because all tested language groups seemed to relate to the same "most typical representations" of white, black, red, yellow, green and blue. Even when a language didn't have individual terms for all six colours some tests have shown that the speakers of the language still related to more or less the same representations of the six colours, but some of these results have been disputed.
In languages with still more terms "brown" or "purple" is often added next, later "pink",, "orange" and "grey". Apart from "orange", these eleven terms are pure colour names with no inherent meaning pointing to an object that exemplifies the colour. This selection is typical for English and quite a lot of other languages. Apparently Greece, Turkey and Russia have twelve standard terms; splitting the blue region of colour space into a light blue term and a dark blue term. Of course there are lots and lots of other colour names that you and I and the paint shop on the corner will use, but they may be specific to a product, a culture or to each and one of us, and hence not termed "universal".
What is colour memory? Or rather, what is it not? I still don't understand the nature of my "colour memory". But I know this:
- Thinking "green" brings up a memory of a scene dominated by green where most other colour details are faded.
- It's an amalgam of green; not one specific green that I can replicate or pick out from a colour sampler.
- The source of my memory is a toddlers perception of "green"; based on the experience of seeing and sensing.
- The word "green" triggers a memory from an age when I most likely didn't relate to my surroundings in colour terms yet. Then, why do words have such an impact?
Where in my brain is the memory lodged? It must be filed under vision, sensory and speech. Summing it up, I realise that I'll have to search in other fields of colour research. More neuro and psycho - It's all quite mixed.
Anyway, to me the memory is more than a coloured image in my brain as it also holds the key to different sensory aspects of the colour. Brought together, this is my idea of green. My essence of green.
Memory about colour, like what I share here, has nothing to do
with having a physical capacity for "colour memory". Studies tend to
show that we are not equipped with a precise and reliable memory for
colour; we do rather badly when tested.
But there
seems to be a tendency to remember focal colours more accurately than
other colours, even across speakers of languages with different colour
naming systems.
From what I have been able to gather there is no colour equivalent to the perfect pitch we know from music.
We do get
better by practice and we are better at remembering a colour scheme
than a single hue. Take an interior: red walls, white ceiling, grey
floor, blue doors, yellow chairs etc. This makes up a a whole picture
where each colour stands in relation to the others. They define each
other. This picture can convey a mood; sad, cheerful, sombre or playful
- like a piece of music. Designers and artists learn many skills and
knowing how to use colour to create or recreate a mood has for me been
one of the most intriguing and fulfilling.
Colour work demands precision. Clearly it's futile to rely on memory. Fortunately there are tools. Colour can be organised according to different colour theories, systems and standards. The colour wheel being the simplest and most commonly known system for organising. Based on a given system, colours can be referenced with numbers and letters and written down like music.
Already by observing and learning the names of the rainbow, a spectral phenomenon, a child will have acquired a reference for seven colours. By further studying the rainbow a child will also perceive that those colours follow one another in a floating way. And when wondering about why this is so, the child will have taken the first step into the marvel and mystery of colour.
More links:
Johan Wolfgang von Goethe
Albert Henry Munsell, American painter, invented the Munsell Color System with atlas (1915).
Nicolas Claidiere: Colour categories research
Sandy Gautam : Musings on cognitive and developmental psychology seasoned with occasional linguistic digressions and diversions.
Colour matters - with lots of links
Philosophy links:
Barry Maund "The Philosophy of Color " Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy
Hardin " A green thought in a green shade" The Harvard Review of Philosophy
For children and parents:
Why are things coloured? Explaining colour
About rainbows
Kind of rainbow
Double rainbow
"Where Rainbow Rises" photo Wing-Chi Poon, Wikimedia Commons
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