"Colours of the Mind”

For hundreds of years there have been many theories developed around the understanding of colour, such as in 1704 where Newton’s Optiks theory was published. Taking colour into his own methods, Newton’s theory was a way to explain the scientific showings of colour through the study of light using such devices like the spectrum. Artists like Newton have influenced the peoples understanding of colour and allowed the creation of a theory of ‘colour vision’.                                                              Goethe, in 1810 was the founder of ‘After Colour’, where we are to understand the perception of colour through a symbolic and physiological theory where his theories were more “a colour theory for artists”¹ These theories help us recognize, as people and artists, how we see colour and how it makes us feel. “Painting is truer for the eye than reality itself. It presents what a man would like to see, and should see but not what he habitually sees”²

The picture above is a piece by the artist Henri Matisse called ‘The Red Studio’ 1911, who was in the impressionist movement. Matisse was influenced by the phycology effect of colours of the mind, ‘Matisse was able to gain a greater understanding of how colour heightens and controls composition by adopting a range of techniques from various movements’³

^{1, 2}  Gage, J. (1993). Colours of the Mind in Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (pp.191-212). New York: Thames and Hudson

³Clarke, L. (n.d.). eview. Retrieved 8 14, 2011, from eview.adu PDF: http://eview.anu.edu.au/cross-sections/vol1/pdf/ch02.pdf