The Experience of Colour
A powerful colour experience is an intense sensory experience. The experience of colour is the WOW factor.
Recall the bush fires scenes we see every year. Even seeing the fires on a screen stimulates the sense of smell and taste of smoke and burnt eucalypts. Every sense is intensified to the point where we are shocked out of our everyday rational mind into the non rational. It is awesome, waking us up to wonder and mystery and the uncontrollable power of the natural elements.
The direct personal impact of a sunset, fire or water, can be life changing peak experiences which lead us to a reconnection with the power of nature, rather than nature being a thing we must dominate. From this point of view colours are the natural forces inherent in light itself and immersion in colour brings an experience of its power to invigorate the human energy field.
In earlier times experience was the method by which knowledge about colour was acquired and those who had more experience were considered more knowledgeable.
Today ‘experience’ is no longer considered to be ‘proof’ of knowledge and according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary shows two faces.
One face is the external kind of observation which we understand to be the facts of a situation:
experience, n. Actual observation of or practical acquaintance with facts or events; knowledge resulting from this, whence experienced (-st) a.; event that affects one, as an unpleasant ~; fact, process, of being so affected, as I learnt by ~
(The Concise Oxford Dictionary)
The other face is the internal feeling or meeting with colour:
experience, v.t. Meet with, feel, undergo (pleasure, treatment, fate, etc); learn, find, (that, how, etc)
(The Concise Oxford Dictionary)
In the 19th century colour was understood as an experience involving both observation and feeling. Colour research was carried out by artists in their studios and workshops, from which early colour science emerged from the personal experience of colour. By the beginning of the 21st century this kind of science has been abandoned in favour of mathematical instrumentation with its increasing abstraction from colour phenomena.
A split has occurred between:
- observation requiring the viewer’s separation from the object or event, and
- immersion in the feeling and meeting with the colour.
We can see that this process has occurred in viewing the polarised approaches of art and science to colour theory as demonstrated in the Newtonian (colour is qualified light) and the Goethean approach (colour arises from the intermingling of light and darkness):
Left to right:
A Newtonian colour wheel, two Goethean colour wheels
How has this affected the way we experience colour?
Non-sense approach to colour
It means that the Newtonian approach to colour is separate from feeling and personal experience which is a non-sense approach. Here the theory of colour is based on mathematisation which takes us away from the phenomena and thereby we remain outside it as observers.
Sense approach to colour
A sense approach to colour arises out of the phenomena of colour which refers only to itself instead of outside itself. Here the theory of colour arises out of the experience of the phenomena of colour.
So what we have at present is colour science that takes us away from the senses which is the non-sense approach and artistic colour thought which takes us into the senses, which from an artistic perspective is a sensible approach!
My concern as both artist and consultant is to create unified colour experiences for my viewers and to create images in which the viewer is immersed in colour. It means that both the facts about the media in which the colour exists as well as the feeling experience of the colour are equally important for the images to make sense – even if I want to subvert the rational mind to make non-sense images!
So my job is to get inside the colour and to meet with it in the way that Johannes von Goethe describes in his Fahbenlehre (Goethe, Johannes von, 1842; 1970) and further developed in the work of Maria Schindler. Goethe’s exercises for experiencing colour are most important for all artists to study and should be part of all visual arts curricula. Goethe’s work has been marginalized as not being scientific for the past two hundred years but has been reconsidered by 20th century scientists such as David Bohm and Henri Bortoft.
Goethe’s Way of Science written in 1996 published by Floris Books demonstrates the reunification of the art and science of colour through experiences in colour and light.
Through the experience of colour, art and science unite changing perceptions of time, space and memory through the reconnection of head and facts with heart and feeling.