Why Color Matters
This project started from 2 things: curiosity and passion. Curiosity about what color means to others. Passion for what color brings to my everyday life.
Which led me to these questions: What does color mean to me, and to others? Why does color play such an important role in my daily choices? Does color impact people in the same way it impacts me?
Shade matters.
Nearly every human response to color is dependent on its shade. A deep, burgundy wine will have different impact on a person from a bright, comic-book red. The difference between the dark, muted yellow of a jar of mustard and the bright, sunny yellow of a daffodil can be what makes or breaks a color for an individual's preference. Certain shades of green remind people of puke. Other shades evoke images of nature and adventure.
Image courtesy of Jerry Enos Painting
Author and illustrator Ingrid Sundberg has designed what she calls a "Color Thesaurus" to name various shades of what might be considered one solid color. "Having a variety of color names at my fingertips helps me to create specificity in my writing," Sundberg says. "I can paint a more evocative image in my reader’s mind if I describe a character’s hair as the color of rust or carrot-squash, rather than red."
This Color Thesaurus is what I'll be using to supplement my color profiles and guide my exploration with various shades of color. Each Color Profile attests not only to prime colors, but to their shades and what meaning they might hold.
Color is a privilege.
The ability to make choices about color is a socio-economic and cultural privilege. Not everyone has the freedom to make choices about color in their daily lives. For some people, color is a rare and unique opportunity to express themselves when they otherwise can't. Kids who wear uniforms to school may flaunt their vibrant personalities through their clothes on free dress days. Tenants of a house that doesn't belong to them may have to find creative ways of decorating their space without repainting the walls.
It takes time, money, and resources to make choices about color. Sometimes, you don't get a choice at all. The dull, smog-ridden grey of the polluted sky in your hometown. The beige of barren dessert sand, the blue of a seashore.
Colors of one's external environment can are uncontrollable factors. But what about their internal environment like their own house? To be able to repaint your walls or choose your own furniture, you need the ownership and security of a stable home. What if you're only a tenant of a house? What if you move every year to a new house? Without consistency, maintaining a color scheme can be difficult.
The ability to make color choices in fashion implies a freedom of dress and self-expression. If you wore uniforms in school, you might not have had the freedom of making color choices on a daily basis in your wardrobe. If you grew up in a low-income family or received hand-me-downs, you may have had fewer choices in color due to limited resources.
It's a privilege, then, to even be able to pick out the colors of your outfit for the day from your wardrobe. Color involves minute, but regular choices made every single day. Without color, many of your choices may look very different.
But mostly, color is multifaceted.
Some of the answers to the questions about color asked above have been answered; others remain mysteries. That's the beauty of our love of color: it can't be fully explained why the human eye takes pleasure in one, recoils at another. We can all-too-easily accept what colors we like or don't like. But when we begin to explore how colors are used in our everyday choices, we can see how those colors might .be shaping us—or, on the other hand, how we might be shaping our social construct of color.
This is the Habit of Color. I hope, like me, you'll find a new way of experiencing and appreciating color from this journey. Thank you.
