Color & Emotion

1.  Color impacts our emotions personally, sometimes in a very intense way.  Some colors are even associated with certain emotions, like how we associate blue with both water and sadness.  Some of these associations are universal, but a large number of them are culturally/socially conditioned.  Blue is a good example: its association with water is also an association with freedom, and while sadness is also an emotion connected with blue, in India it is a color associated with the gods Vishnu & Kali.  Emotions are influenced by the value and intensity of the color, with darker/more intense colors eliciting stronger emotions.  Color combinations can create and influence emotions.  Contrasting colors, like those found in Van Gogh’s café The Night Café, can serve to create tension for us.  Complimentary colors can serve to increase the intensity of the colors used and therefore deepen/strengthen the emotions the painting elicits in us. 

2.  The most intriguing color theories are the ones surrounding the optical tricks colors can play on us.  I particularly enjoy the afterimage trick – tiring out the color receptors in the eye/brain and imprinting images in them is kind of cool to me.  I am a very big fan of the Impressionists – and Monet is my favorite visual artist – so I found it intriguing the way they used this visual trick to create shadows.  I particularly think of Monet’s Haystacks series because he painted haystacks at different seasons of the year and the winter painting is almost the afterimage of the summer painting. 

3.  The biggest impact on the connection between emotion and art in the Color video came from watching the painter – Rebecca – create her piece near the end.  I was struck by how she worked so hard to adjust the color so that it would invoke the emotion she was keeping in her mind of the place she was painting.  She could tell by looking at it that the emotions weren’t matching up right, so the audience wouldn’t get it either, but when it clicked she was so positive that it was the right emotion and that other people would get it. 

4.  The Feelings video didn’t really talk about color per se; it was mostly about how art is tied into the events of history, the related emotions, and how those emotions have been manifested in art since Medieval times.  However, you can see in some of the paintings the narrator points out how color was used to invoke emotion.  I’m thinking particularly about one of the works of Jacques-Louis David – Oath of the Horatii.  I could see how the use of red in the robes of the main personage, along with the long & straight lines used to make him, could evoke strong feelings about his masculinity.  The color would be important because it makes the figure appear larger and advancing, which would help to focus us and imply the emotional message the artist intended.