Emotional Colours

“Generally speaking, color directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul.”

- Wassily Kandinsky

This exercise is inspired by a comment from the previous exercise. Many believe that underlying compositional elements work on our subconscious. That they can trigger feelings. The question we discussed previously was if the horizontal line in a photograph triggered a grounding calm. It was noted, by some, that it helps with the calm but it isn’t the overwhelming emotional response in all cases it’s used.

Late last year I discussed with a colour therapist and they believed that colour triggers an universal unconscious response. This is the basis for colour therapy.

In this exercise we can explore the emotional response to various hues.

Post photographs, that are predominantly (the overwhelming majority) only one colour, one hue. Search deep and wide and post lots of different colours. But please make sure they are monochromatic and are of only one colour.

Make a new post for each colour, and if that colour already is posted, please add your photograph in the same colour as a part of that same post. This is so we keep all the discussion around red in the red post with all the red photographs. Title your post with the colour.

Whomever gets this going first will take the lead. If you have a photograph of a different colour start a new post.

The discussion is about what emotions each colour elicits in you for you for each photograph.

How does each photograph make you feel?

Let’s see if we can reach some conclusions about each colour. No need to discuss other aspects of composition. Let’s get right into emotional colours.

One thing to note, we will get a different response from warm and cool colours. A cold blue is a Prussian Blue, while a warm one is Ultramarine. So just considering the hue ‘blue’ will give us an inconclusive answer.

Here is a link to a tutorial on warm and cool colours if you are unsure about this. https://www.justpaint.org/defining-warm-and-cool-colors-its-all-relative/

Photographs and text copyright © Len Metcalf 2019