Colors

March 28, 2026|Ziza Klex

The more I make art, the more colors seem to exist.

I do not mean that in some mystical, incense-and-crystals sort of way. I mean it quite literally. It feels as though the world has been acquiring additional strata ever since I started painting seriously. A wall is no longer white. It is bluish white, creamy white, chalk white, hospital white, pearl white, old-paper white, a white with a green undertone, a white with a violet melancholy.

And once one has noticed that, it becomes impossible to go back.

Since I am, by now, mildly obsessive about shades of blue, I started reading. I found art history, neuroscience, linguistics, psychology, and, quite inevitably, some rather unpleasant ideological baggage attached to the Western cult of whiteness and chromatic restraint.

As it turns out, color is never just decoration. It is perception, language, emotion, politics, history, and sometimes plain stupidity dressed up as refinement.

So let us begin at the beginning.

What is color?

That sounds like the kind of question one asks shortly before becoming unbearable at dinner parties, but it is in fact useful.

Scientifically speaking, color is not a property that objects simply “have” in themselves. Color is a perceptual event. Light of different wavelengths reaches the eye, objects absorb and reflect parts of that light, and the retina’s cone photoreceptors, sensitive to shorter, medium, and longer wavelengths, send signals that the brain interprets as color.

In that sense, color is neither pure physics nor pure fantasy. It is a collaboration between light, matter, the eye, and the brain. Sounds crazy right?

Well that is the scientific version.

The artistic one is both less exact and, in some ways, more truthful to lived experience. In painting, color is not merely wavelength processed by the visual cortex. It is atmosphere, tension, temperature, symbolism, rhythm. A blue next to orange is not the same blue as that same blue next to grey. A red can scream, seduce, warn, or glow depending on value, saturation, and company. In art, color is descriptive, yes, but also expressive and relational. It is never alone. (tate.org.uk)

This duality interests me enormously. On the one hand, color is measurable. On the other, it behaves like mood.

And perhaps that is why artists become so attached to it, because color is one of those rare things that is at once material and psychological. It sits precisely at the point where the world outside us meets the world inside us.

About that one, special color, BLUE

If I had to nominate one color for the role of artistic diva, it would be blue.

I say this as someone who has become embarrassingly attached to blue in all its bureaucratically overqualified subcategories. “Blue” now feels almost offensively vague to me. It is like calling every tree simply “greenish plant.” Once you have seen cyan, lapis, navy, turquoise, ultramarine, powder blue, steel blue, and that strange faded blue of old Catholic imagery, the general term begins to collapse under its own insufficiency.

And apparently this is a whole thing:

Art history is full of artists who treated blue less as a color than as a condition. Picasso, of course, had his Blue Period, roughly between 1901 and 1904, in which blue became grief, poverty, withdrawal, and spiritual coldness all at once. Yves Klein built an entire artistic myth around blue, most famously through International Klein Blue. Van Gogh pushed blue into emotional and atmospheric extremes; Chagall flooded dreamscapes and lovers with it. Blue has been precious, sacred, melancholy, celestial, modern, and synthetic, sometimes all at once. The history of blue in painting is also the history of artists and chemists trying, desperately and repeatedly, to possess it. Natural ultramarine, derived from lapis lazuli, was once so rare and expensive that its use carried real prestige. Later pigments made blue more accessible, but not less seductive. (nationalgallery.org.uk)

So yes, artists are obsessed with blue, quite rationally, if you ask me.

But the story gets stranger when one leaves the atelier and enters linguistics, anthropology, and cognitive science.

Blue in language, blue in the brain

One of the most fascinating things I found while reading is that blue is not sliced up by all cultures in the same way.

In some languages, what English or French would distinguish as blue and green fall under one broader category. Vietnamese, for example, traditionally uses xanh for both, with modifiers added when precision is needed. Other languages divide blue differently from English, sometimes far more finely. Russian, famously, makes a basic distinction between lighter blue (goluboy) and darker blue (siniy), and experiments have shown that Russian speakers can be faster at discriminating blues that cross that linguistic boundary than English speakers are. That does not mean language creates the eye from scratch, but it does suggest that naming can sharpen habitual perception. (pnas.org)

This point matters, because the seductive internet version of the argument is usually stated far too bluntly, if you cannot name a color, you cannot see it. That is not quite accurate. Human color perception has biological foundations that predate vocabulary; infants, for instance, show evidence of categorical hue perception before language is fully in place. But language does seem to help organize, stabilize, and accelerate certain distinctions. In other words, the color does not fail to exist, but it may fail to stand out, to become conceptually crisp, to become a thing you can grasp quickly and repeatedly. (scientificamerican.com)

Which brings us to the ancient Greeks, and to one of my favorite examples of how strange color history can be.

You have probably heard the popular claim that the ancient Greeks “could not see blue.” That statement is melodramatic and should be handled with care. Ancient Greeks were not wandering around visually impaired in a beige universe. They could obviously perceive the same physical light humans perceive. What is true is that ancient Greek color vocabulary does not map neatly onto ours, and that blue did not function as a simple, stable lexical category in the way it often does for us today. Homer’s famous “wine-dark sea” is part of this story. In Greek literature, sea and sky are described through terms that emphasize brightness, darkness, gleam, texture, and shifting surface qualities rather than a clean modern “blue.” Scholars note that ancient Greek texts use terms like glaukos and kuaneos, but one does not find our straightforward “blue sea, blue sky” formula there. (aeon.co)

That, to me, is not evidence of deficiency. It is evidence that perception is never only retinal. It is cultural, verbal, historical. People do not merely receive the world; they learn how to partition it.

And so I come back, smugly but sincerely, to my shades of blue.

Because once one knows the words, navy, cyan, turquoise, lapis, ultramarine, sky blue, pastel blue, the world acquires more joints. It becomes more articulated. A distinction that might once have floated past as “some sort of blue” becomes specific, and specificity is one of the great pleasures of consciousness. Language, in that sense, does not invent reality from nothing; it enriches our grip on it. It gives contour to experience. (pnas.org)

So yes, perhaps blue is no longer one color for me because art has made me linguistically greedy.

What color does to us

This is the part where many articles on color become either terribly mystical or terribly corporate.

On the mystical side, “green heals the soul, orange unlocks abundance,” and so on. On the corporate side, “use red to increase conversions.” I find both traditions slightly exhausting. Still, psychological research does support a more sober claim, color can influence affect, attention, judgment, and behavior, though the effects are highly context-dependent and not reducible to cute internet charts. Reviews of the literature show that color carries meaning and can alter psychological functioning; blue light, for example, has been linked in some contexts to increased alertness and attention, while red can heighten attentional priority or function as a signal of warning, dominance, or error depending on the situation. Studies on interiors also suggest that people often prefer blue spaces for activities like studying, while white ceilings remain conventionally preferred. In other words, color matters, but never in isolation from context, culture, and task. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

This, to me, only makes modern chromatic asceticism stranger.

Because let us be honest, we live in an aesthetic culture deeply enamored of white, black, grey, concrete, glass, beige, greige, and all their respectable cousins. I do like minimalist design. I like brutalist buildings. I like clean lines, severe volumes, and the occasional cathedral-like dignity of raw concrete. But only when they are interrupted, deliberately, gloriously, by contrast, color, texture, oddity, plant life, ceramics, a Persian rug, a cobalt lamp, a vintage orange chair, a turquoise wall, a magenta poster. My own fantasy is some form of solarpunk interior, part vintage, part retro, part spaceship, part greenhouse, and absolutely not terrified of pigment.

So why, despite all we know about color’s perceptual and psychological richness, do so many “modern” visual languages still fetishize chromatic restraint?

Partly because white, black, and grey have been coded as rational, clean, controlled, and sophisticated within dominant strands of Western modernism. Minimalism presents itself as neutral, and “neutral” is one of those suspicious words that often means “historically privileged but pretending not to be.” Modernist taste has long distrusted ornament and exuberance, often treating them as morally and culturally inferior. (scielo.cl)

And here the story becomes uglier.

Whiteness, ornament, and the old Western contempt for color

The Western suspicion of color did not arise in a vacuum. It is tied, historically, to ideas about civilization, purity, hierarchy, and race.

One emblematic figure here is Adolf Loos, whose essay Ornament and Crime became a canonical anti-ornament text of modernist design theory. Loos did not merely argue that ornament was economically wasteful or aesthetically outdated. His rhetoric drew explicitly on evolutionary and racial hierarchies, opposing modern Europeans to peoples he described in “primitive” terms. That matters. It means that the old opposition between plain, minimal, civilized and ornate, colorful, primitive was not just a stylistic preference; it was entangled with colonial and racist thinking. (scielo.cl)

This is the point at which I must insert my own position, as a white woman writing this from inside Western visual culture. I find it both absurd and infuriating that colorfulness, pattern, ornament, and expressiveness have so often been coded as lesser, as underdeveloped, vulgar, excessive, feminine, foreign, uncultivated. Cultural differences are precious. Aesthetic traditions differ, and that is good. But the old hierarchy that places white, restrained, supposedly “pure” form above color and decorative abundance is not only intellectually shabby; it is historically contaminated.

And it persists, even when people imagine they are just being tasteful.

The irony, of course, is almost too good, one of the greatest icons of supposedly pure white Western beauty, the marble sculpture of ancient Greece, turns out not to have been white in the way modern myth imagines it.

The myth of white Greece

For centuries, the white marble body of classical sculpture has functioned as a kind of aesthetic idol, pure form, pure reason, pure beauty, pure restraint. It has also, not coincidentally, been useful to modern fantasies of whiteness.

But ancient Greek and Roman sculpture was often polychrome. Not metaphorically. Literally painted, adorned, gilded, detailed, and vividly finished. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent work on polychromy makes this quite explicit, ancient sculpture was once colorful, and modern scholarship has increasingly recovered traces of pigments and surface treatments that had long been lost, ignored, or ideologically minimized. The Met also states directly that reconstruction work on polychromy helps combat the misconception of white purity in ancient Greece and Rome. (metmuseum.org)

That is deliciously embarrassing for the cult of white marble.

The white statue, in other words, is not a timeless truth but a historical misunderstanding, one that later aesthetic traditions elevated into an ideal. The Met has even described the equation of white marble sculpture with ideal beauty as a social and aesthetic construct born of misconception and cultural tradition. (store.metmuseum.org)

So the supposedly superior colorlessness of classical art was, to a considerable extent, a mirage.

One could hardly ask for a better example of how ideology works, it takes damage, erosion, and historical loss, then repackages them as moral perfection.

A small manifesto for the colorful

At this point I should probably pretend to be measured and cautious and say something like, “the question is complex.” Which, regrettably, it is.

Yes, color psychology is context-dependent. Yes, not every white room is a manifesto of oppression. Yes, minimalism can be beautiful. Yes, monochrome can be powerful. I know this perfectly well; I like monochrome art, and I genuinely enjoy certain brutalist and minimalist aesthetics.

But I also think something has gone badly wrong in any culture that continues to treat color as unserious, inferior, childish, vulgar, or culturally suspect while simultaneously marketing wellness, emotional intelligence, sensory richness, and individuality as desirable goods.

Because color is not trivial. It changes how we perceive, sort, feel, and inhabit the world. Language deepens our sensitivity to it. Art teaches us to notice its subtleties. Research suggests it affects mood and cognition. History reminds us that some of our most revered white ideals are, in fact, whitewashed. (plato.stanford.edu)

So yes, I am willing to say it quite plainly, it is time to drop the idiotic old hierarchies that place the pale, the restrained, and the allegedly pure above the colorful and expressive. It is time to stop confusing desaturation with superiority. It is time, perhaps, for a colorful revolution.

Conclusion, color is life

The more I paint, the more colors seem to exist. That sentence, which at first sounded merely personal and poetic to me, now appears to be partly cognitive, partly linguistic, partly artistic, and partly historical.

Color is light interpreted by the nervous system. It is also vocabulary, cultural training, and attention. The gaining of words is also the gaining of depth.

And color is, quite simply, good for us, not in a crude one-color-one-emotion horoscope sort of way, but in the more serious sense that chromatic environments shape feeling, cognition, and experience. Meanwhile, many of our inherited ideals of whiteness and purity in art and design turn out to rest on false histories and ugly prejudices. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

So perhaps the matter is simpler than all the theory makes it seem.

Color is life.
It gives the world more layers.
It gives language more precision.
It gives perception more depth.
And if history has confused pallor with purity, then so much the worse for history.

I, for one, would rather live in a world with lapis walls, rust velvet, mint tiles, ochre books, cyan shadows, pink dusk, and twelve kinds of blue than in one that mistakes greyness for intelligence.