NOTES ON STEVEN BLEICHER'S CONTEMPORARY COLOR: THEORY & USE CHAPTER 3
- Color psychology is the study of hues as a determinant of human behavior. Color influences perceptions that are not obvious, such as the taste of food. Colors have qualities that can cause certain emotions in people.[1] Colors can also enhance the effectiveness of placebos.[2] For example, red or orange pills are generally used as stimulants.[2] How color influences individuals may differ depending on age, gender, and culture. For instance, heterosexual men tend to report that red outfits enhance female attractiveness, while heterosexual females deny any outfit color impacting that of men.[3] Although color associations can vary contextually between cultures, color preference is to be relatively uniform across gender and race. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_psychology
- According to some evidence, humans started developing blue colorants 5,000 years ago. The semi-precious stone Lapis Lazuli, a deep-blue metamorphic rock, was highly prized among the Egyptians. - In the European and Western world, the concept of the color blue comes from the painted robes of the Virgin Mary. All her attributes of honesty, truth, and goodness have been transformed into navy blue.
- During the Renaissance, this bright blue mineral was often combined with other ingredients, which led to development of the pigment Ultramarine, the most expensive of all pigments. Afterwards, blue dyes were spread throughout the world.
- The psychology of color blue is non-confrontational; it promotes peace and tranquility. Some of the descriptions for color blue include calmness and serenity. Blue is often described as peaceful, tranquil, and even orderly. This may be due to our perception of oceans as blue. For some people, blue can appear as a mentally soothing color.
- Surveys show that blue is the least appetizing color as well, which explains why some weight loss plans suggest eating food of a blue plate. It is found that blue lowers blood pressure, thus, slows down heart rate, because of which a body becomes relaxed.
- United Nations’ peacekeeping forces wear a light blue uniform. This color does not have the authority or militaristic connotations of navy blue.
- The "rose of temperaments" (Temperamenten-Rose) compiled by Goethe and Schiller in 1798/9. The diagram matches twelve colors to human occupations or their character traits, grouped in the four temperaments: * choleric (red/orange/yellow): tyrants, heroes, adventurers * sanguine (yellow/green/cyan) hedonists, lovers, poets * phlegmatic (cyan/blue/violet): public speakers, historians * melancholic (violet/magenta/red): philosophers, pedants, rulers.
- Wassily Kandinsky’s work seems to come alive with color, and a lot of this is due to his deep, detailed understanding of color’s meaning. Kandinsky viewed color in a synesthetic way. That is, he would associate certain colors with musical tones or even certain shapes.
- Kandinsky taught at the Bauhaus from 1922 until its closure in 1933, but his interest in color and its effects on people began long before that. Kandinsky’s 1910 book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, takes the reader through different colors and Kandinsky’s perceptions about them. About green, Kandinsky writes, “I could compare completely green with a calm, broaching, middle tones of a violin.” He connects the color white to a musical pause: “The white color affects our psyche as a great silence, which is for us absolutely. Internally, it sounds like a no-sound, which quite closely matches a pause in the music. This silence is not dead, it is full of possibilities.”
- The Bauhaus movement was set apart by its close examination of color (among other things), and Kandinsky’s teaching built upon Itten’s connection of color to mood and feeling. Kandinsky’s synesthetic view of color mirrored some of Paul Klee’s color theory, too.
- The "Land effect”, is the capacity to see full color (if muted) images solely by looking at a photo with red and gray wavelengths. The effect was discovered by Edwin H. Land, who was attempting to reconstruct James Clerk Maxwell's early experiments in full-colored images. Land realized that, even when there were no green or blue wavelengths present in an image, the visual system would still perceive them as green or blue by discounting the red illumination. Land described this effect in a 1959 article in Scientific American.[27]
- In 1977, Land wrote another Scientific American article that formulated his "retinex theory" to explain the Land effect. The word "retinex" is a portmanteau formed from "retina" and "cortex", suggesting that both the eye and the brain are involved in the processing. Land, with John McCann, also developed a computer program designed to imitate the retinex processes taking place in human physiology. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_constancy
- The color green seems to make positive emotions stronger and negative emotions weaker. White and pink may have similar effects, but researchers are still studying those. Meanwhile, the color red seems to have the opposite effect and make negative emotions -- like those linked to failure and danger -- more intense. The color green can help get the creative juices flowing. Scientists compared it with white, gray, red, and blue, and green helped people do better with both word-based and picture-based activities. So, if you’re looking for a new color for your office walls, think green.
- You may be happier and less tired after you exercise around the color green. It makes sense then that people who exercise outside, where there’s more green, feel better. And having more “green space” where you live tends to boost your mental health. |https://www.webmd.com/balance/ss/slideshow-colors-affect-you}|
- We recognize a product by its color before we read its label. Color psychology is also widely used in marketing and branding. Marketers see color as important, as color can influence a consumers' emotions and perceptions about goods and services. Logos for companies are important since the logos can attract more customers. This happens when customers believe the company logo matches the personality of the goods and services, such as the color pink heavily used on Victoria's Secret branding.[5] Colors are also important for window displays in stores. Research shows that colors such as red tended to attract spontaneous purchasers, despite cool colors such as blue being more favorable.[6] Red and yellow, as a combination, can stimulate hunger, which may help to explain, in part, the success of fast-food restaurants such as McDonald's, Burger King, and In-N-Out Burger.[7] The phenomenon has been referred to as the "ketchup & mustard" theory.[8] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_psychology
- Portia Munson’s works reflects the deep social conditioning regarding color preference that people undergo daily. From a young age, Munson has been collecting plastics from landfills, swap shops and yard sales to delineate them in a way that challenges what it means to be a woman and a citizen of planet Earth. Her work consistently explores the meaning of color, the destruction of nature and the definition of femininity through installations, mandalas and still life paintings.
- Munson says she works to make something ‘beautiful and disturbing” out of the items she finds and the way that she pieces and places these items together continuously touch on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals of Gender Equality, Responsible Consumption and Production and Climate Action. Using her lifetime collection of plastics and waste, Munson has been releasing and reforming her series the Pink Project, which was originally conceived in 1994 to redefine femininity through garbage
-There was a renewed interest in the use of color for its expressive and emotional qualities in the 1980. The Neo-Expressionist movement in Italy was also known as the Italian Transavanguardia and one of its leading artists was Francesco Clemente. -Similar to other Neo-Expressionists, Francesco Clemente’s work also contained much of a relation to sexuality, raw emotions, and even brutality. He depicts a dark side of humanity, usually unspoken and held back. In his paintings, Clemente incorporates some visual elements of Surrealism, as well as the signs and symbols of other cultures, such as Hindu spiritualism in India, or the Candomble religion of Brazil.
- Art critics throughout the 1980s claimed him to be the most articulate among other Neo-Expressionists. He was the one with the simplest technique and the most international references. Today, Clemente continues to explore individual identity, constantly questioning the idea of oneself. www.widewalls.ch/magazine/neo-expressio…
