{"id":92749,"date":"2021-02-28T18:44:33","date_gmt":"2021-02-28T17:44:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/centmagazine.co.uk\/?p=92749"},"modified":"2021-03-03T12:47:46","modified_gmt":"2021-03-03T11:47:46","slug":"colour-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.centmagazine.co.uk\/?p=92749","title":{"rendered":"Colour Power"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Colour is so powerful, so automated in our minds. We make associations with colour without even thinking about it. Why do we have such a visceral response? What is it about colour that makes us feel<\/em> so deeply? Why does it stir these automated responses? Is it nature or nurture? Whether your ‘seeing red’, ‘green with envy’, or you’ve ‘got the blues’ ‘Colour Power’<\/em> explores why it is, that we associate colour and mood, as we take a look at the different cultural references to colours. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Weronika Kusmider and Lauren Tighe<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There are some universal associations we have with a colour, the symbology is often societally unconsciously accepted. Yet colour meanings differ dramatically from culture to culture; colour represents intangible ideas and emotions within art, design, music, film, perfume and more. In fact, there is not a single area of human life that is not affected by colour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jamie Ward, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, says there is a good reason for a connection between light and sound. In the earliest stages of our development as babies, our brains don\u2019t make a distinction between where one sense starts and another one ends. So at the start of our lives, sound and colour are perceived as the same phenomenon. Alongside this, our cultural conditioning will dictate the emotions we associate with certain colours, tones and hues. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Music and colour have common emotional qualities. Certainly, most music conveys emotion. Experiments have shown that when a group of people listens to specific types of music and then are asked what colour they saw, the hues matched to the emotions we feel represented by certain colours, happy to sad, angry to calm, lively to dreary, active to passive, and strong to weak. Therefore happy sounds mean bright colours, aggressive music relates to red tones, calming natural musical sounds make us think of the greens and blues of nature, so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In art and anthropology, colour symbolism refers to a colour\u2019s ability to signify meaning to a viewer. Think of the powerful greys and black in a Turner painting. The Shipwreck<\/em><\/a>, for example, is all grey, blacks and dark blues, representing danger and death, the wild of nature, man, and machine against the natural world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In classical art, colours pertain to emotions very directly, but our theories on colour and colour as a discussion point goes back to the earliest of philosophers. Aristotle maintained that the two principal “colours” were white and black – light and its absence – and that all colours derived from one of the four elements: air, water, earth and fire. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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He also explained that the true primary colours, after white and black, were yellow and blue: since we “see” the sun’s pure white light as yellow, and the blackness of space as a blue sky. His theory of colours was somewhat philosophical rather than a scientific approach. But to be fair, this is actually very much the basis for many cultures when it comes to colour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whilst artist Claude Monet, the king of colour in art, said “I have finally discovered the true colour of the atmosphere. It\u2019s violet. Fresh air is violet. Three years from now, everyone will work in violet”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or watch the film here from the artist Olafur Eliasson Room with one colour <\/em>to see how our minds can be almost tricked with colour and the lack of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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