Happy Pride Month! In honor of my community's flag, I'm going to celebrate color all month. Plus, I'm gearing up to teach a class on color!
Also, I'll be teaching two workshops later this month, both in-person and online. The first is another "Uncovering Your Purpose" workshop in San Francisco for ArtSpan. The second is titled "Create a Signature Series," which you can learn about here.
"My Children Are Transformed" from the "Destiny" comic in "TransAmerican Heroes" series, oil and digital collage and painting
Now to color!
To me, color is delicious. I drink in the rich tapestry of flowers in our neighborhood, the cobalts and ceruleans in the sky, the pastel stack of T-shirts in my drawer. I get secret joy from matching the color of my underwear to something else I’m wearing. And I never get tired of bringing color to life in my paintings.
Colors make us happy, sad, afraid, excited, irritated, calm. Studies show that just looking at red quickens our pulse. It can symbolize blood, fire, death—or celebration and abundance (especially in China). Blue is my favorite color. It’s soothing to me. It reminds me of sky, water, eggs, gems. My favorite paint is ultramarine blue.
"Refining Spirits 2," oil on canvas
The thirst for color drives us to decorate our bodies and environments with the brightest hues we can summon. It’s like we want to capture Nature’s palette. But for most of history, it was hard to re-create those colors. Dyes would fade. Pigments were hard to come by. Those who figured out how to produce precious reds and purples guarded their secrets for centuries. Royal fortunes were made from scarlet and indigo. When synthetic oil paints became available in the late 1800s, artists lavished their canvases with color.
Here's some nerdy science: As humans, we see a full range of color. Roughly 29-43 million years ago, our ancestors developed the ability to see millions of colors by developing an extra opsin protein in our retinas. Colors are light waves with different frequencies, and different opsins are designed to absorb specific frequencies. We have three types of opsins, which makes us “trichromats.” However, there’s another color that many other species see, that we don’t: ultraviolet. It’s because our lenses filter it out. When Monet lost one of his lenses, he was able to see ultraviolet—so his later lily paintings showed a light warm blue haze, known as “bee purple” because pollinators can see it.
Claude Monet, "Water Lilies," 1915-26
All of this makes sense when we try to understand why we prefer specific colors or color combination. They’re literally impacting our systems with different frequencies. Blue is more soothing because it has a lower vibration on our eyes. Then again, if something bad happened to you in a blue room, you’re not going to have a positive experience with that hue! Color is always subjective.
Art Heals
This one is for my mom, who requested that I share Giorgio Morandi's work. He was an Italian artist who is known for his quiet, meditative still life paintings. His contemplative spirit can be felt in these simple compositions and muted colors. He rarely traveled far from home, preferring to stay in a familiar place and study the objects closest to him, re-arranging and painting them over and over. So in a way, he traveled inside instead of outside. His aesthetic influenced future minimalists, architects, and filmmakers, including Fellini. Oddly enough, just after Mom sent me a book of his work, which was my first introduction to the artist, a new private client mentioned that she was a fan of his color palette. There are no coincidences!
