What You Should Know about Color

Primitive man stood before nature and listened: he heard the chirping of birds, the murmur of streams, and the rustling of leaves. All this fell pleasantly upon his soul, and he began to imitate it — and so there was music.

He looked around him and saw flowers and fruits of many colors, from red to orange to yellow, and saw meadows green and purple; all this fell pleasantly upon his soul, and he began to imitate it — and so there was painting.

Man went on developing in his understanding of music until he realized that this melody, with which he imitated the sounds of nature, could serve him to express states of the soul — sorrow and gloom, joy and triumph — deeper and further-reaching in effect than imitation. From this he arrived at abstract music, which portrays the states of the soul and its tremors.

In painting, however, man remained bound to the forms of nature, painting no color except as tied to some form: yellow is tied to the color of the lemon, red to the color of the rose, blue to the color of the sea. He discovered afterward that the play of mixing colors could express psychological states just as melodies express them — and the theater has begun to exploit the play of colors to create a particular emotional atmosphere, as it played before with music. The masters of this art will discover that they can intoxicate the eye with a melody of colors just as the ear is intoxicated by a melody of tones.

For the eye is the most finely sensitive of the senses, if art can discover the secret of color's effect upon it. Hence modern science has turned to discovering the scientific foundations that will help it profit from the play of colors to the furthest possible extent — not in painting alone, but in our daily life.

The principles of the use of color are not principles difficult to grasp; we can raise our children on them from earliest childhood, so that they become a faculty just as speech is a faculty. To this day we neglect this side of our children's education because we are ignorant of the importance of the arts in a child's life. Through the arts we can lift the child's taste to the highest level of appreciation. If we compare our child with the child of the peoples of the West, we find that their child knows much about the elements of music and painting, because the kindergartens and primary schools train him in something of this, and his family takes him along to art exhibitions and to concerts of music; beyond that, he finds in his family's interest and their conversations on these subjects what opens his mind, awakens him to the importance of these matters, and stirs in him the pleasure of caring about them.

When he grows up, he will either remain ignorant of these arts and ignorant of his own ignorance of them, or he will awaken to their importance and find himself a stranger to them, needing long training before he becomes able to appreciate and understand them.

These principles, once we know them, enter into the very heart of our daily life and become for our children something they are raised on, as they are raised on learning to speak.

For this reason I shall try to set out in these studies, step by step, some of the foundations on which this science rests; for if the study of color is followed in a gradual, ordered fashion, anyone at all can become a master in its use.

We can study color from four sides:

First — the physical side, which acquaints us with the nature of color: what it is, and why we see colors in nature.

Second — the psychological side, which acquaints us with the reasons for color's effect on the human soul, and how it works.

Third — the chemical side, which acquaints us with the properties of colored pigments, the method of mixing them, and how they are obtained.

Fourth — the anatomical side, which acquaints us with the way the eye receives colors, and how some people find it hard to see certain colors owing to a variance arising from an abnormal structure in the eye.

The chemical and anatomical sides do not fall within the scope of our inquiry. What concerns us to stress is the physical side, which has to do with how color is known and how the eye is trained

to true appreciation, and the psychological side, which comes to complete it.

We know from the science of physics that light travels in waves of differing length and varying speed, and that these waves, in their interaction with the eye, produce this sensation which we call color. Every wave in it has its own particular color, according to its length or shortness. Therefore, when the white ray is broken up — as it breaks when it is reflected from the angle of a mirror or through a triangular prism — these waves separate, each on its own, and appear colored, much like the colors of the rainbow. These colors in light are the very ones we see in nature. For things in themselves have no color; rather, each thing has the property of absorbing or radiating certain of the waves of light, and the portion it absorbs or reflects is what determines its color. The red rose is the one that reflects the red ray with a short wave and reflects the remaining rays with longer waves. From this we understand why the colors of things change with the change of light and its kinds. Electric light, for example, alters colors, because the light waves in it differ from the waves of sunlight; and the light of the ordinary lamp alters colors for the same reason.

(To be continued)