The Aesetics of Color:

Color Theory

Look carefully for awhile at this image, and then read the text below.

One can only sense color in light. Color is something that absolutely goes hand in hand with light. Second, the sensors in your eye that are receptive to color have the ability to become fatigued. For example, let's say if you're holding up a heavy weight with one hand at first you're fine, but then you start noticing that you get tremors in your arm if you're holding up something too long with one hand even if it's not really that heavy. The reason why is that your muscles are reacting. They're trying to move in the opposite way of what you're holding up. The sensors in your eye do a similar thing. When they start getting fatigued, they compensate for all the intensity which results from staring at such bright colors for so long. They react by creating the opposite colors, which is why what should be orange on this image starts to appear blue. Blue is the opposite color of orange on the spectrum known as the color wheel. The opposite of green is red, the opposite of black is white. When your eyes become fatigued, you see the opposite color. Color perception is important in the way that you experience color.

Color is produced from light. Color can only be perceived in the context of light and different colors of light will change different things. If we had a red light in a room, all the colors in it would look different. Black light, for example, makes whites really shine. Different colored lights have different effects on colors.

White light contains all the colors of the rainbow. White light contains what is known as the full spectrum of color. Now if you try to mix all your colors, what do you think you would get? You'd get brown, blackish, all these colors because colors that you have in paint are not pure. But if we could take colors and mix them with light we'd get white. By the same token, if you take the bright white light and shine it through a prism which is basically often a piece of glass that breaks the light, it refracts it, then what happens is all the colors are revealed. All the colors together is known as a spectrum. This is something that you can observe in nature. If it's been raining and the sun comes out, a rainbow appears because the little raindrops act like miniature prisms. Now an interesting thing to consider is that all these colors on the spectrum aren't the full spectrum. That's just what we can see and not all people can see all those colors. But beyond what the normal person can see, there's a whole range of ultraviolet that we can't see, but they're still there. Then there's a whole range of infrared we can't see, but they're still there. Also, there are some people that can't see all these colors, people that are color blind. One very common form of color blindness is people who have a very hard time distinguishing between red and green, which is very hard for them when they're driving with the traffic signals. At any rate, all these colors are really a product of light and how they relate to light.

The meaning of colors, on the other hand, is conditioned by cultural. Different cultures have different meanings for different colors. White is the color of death in Asian cultures. Something white would be appropriate to wear to a funeral in Japan because white is the color of death. In western culture, white is a symbol of purity. People wear white at weddings. In Asia, if you wore white to somebody's wedding, that would be a terrible thing to do because that's bringing a hint of death to the wedding proceedings. Colors are very much understood, explained, imagined in terms of their cultural context.

Please explore some examples of cross-cultural color aesthetics below.

Yoruba Color Aesthetics by Dr. Farrar

The Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen by Dr. Vess

For further exploration of the science of color, consult the following links:

Color on the Web: the author's MA project in technical writing.

Color Wheel: brief explication of primary and secondary colors and the results of mixing colors.

Color Wheel and Color Complements brief discussion of primary and secondary colors and balancing colors.

Colors Interactive site where you can modify the colors based on their values.

Dated History of Artists and Pigments and dated color theories

Color Wheel: Real Light and Pigment for Artists interactive site allows you to display colors on your computer monitor.

Color Wheel This is an interactive site powered by a Java applet. Changes the entire wheel to whatever color you click on.

copyright © Dr. Deborah Vess 1998-2001, Georgia College & State University and the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia. All rights reserved. Rights to chapters authored by contributing faculty members reserved to Georgia College & State University, to the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at GC&SU, and to the individual faculty authors.