Feeling Colors

Be sensitive to your sensitive inner capacities to respond to color.

Nathan Cabot Hale

While everyone reacts to colors, a number of factors influence that reaction. Researchers haven’t been able to pin down any universal classification system that will be able to predict how people will interpret and respond to the colors around them. This is because a person’s culture, gender, age, emotional and mental state, specific experiences, mood – as well as the appearance and combination of the colors themselves – can all affect the reaction. And even then, those reactions might vary in type and intensity from person to person.

Color Quotes

A color is as strong as the impression it creates.

Ivan Albright

Color is, on the evidence of language alone, very bound up with the feelings.

Marion Milner

Color is but a sensation and has no existence outside the nervous system of living beings.

Nicholas Ogden Rood

The world is your kaleidoscope, and the varying combinations of colors which at every succeeding moment it presents to you are the exquisitely adjusted pictures of your ever-moving thoughts.

James Allen

Full, saturated colors have an emotional significance I want to avoid.

Lucian Freud

Colors answer feeling in man; shapes answer thought; and motion answers will.

John Sterling

Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power...

Paul Gauguin

A yellow room gives you perpetual sunshine.

Steve Hovland

Raw umber is my favorite color. Whenever I see that color, I can see and smell leaves and new beginnings. Color is felt, after all.

Thomas William Jones

Colors express the main psychic functions of man.

Carl Jung

Color provokes a psychic vibration. Color hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body.

Wassily Kandinsky

As a picture painted in yellow always radiates spiritual warmth, or as one in blue has apparently a cooling effect, so green is only boring.

Wassily Kandinsky

Color, rather than shape, is more closely related to emotion.

David Katz

Color is the daily bread of the eyes. It is not only seen but also must be felt.

Frank Webb

Color stops me in the street, invites me to breathe it in and take it with me.

Suzanne Partridge

Color should be used to depict the three major emotions in a man’s life – anticipation, realization and retrospection.

Ernest Lawson

Purer colors... have in themselves, independently of the objects they serve to express, a significant action on the feelings of those who look at them.

Henri Matisse

Colors pursue me like a constant worry. They even worry me in my sleep.

Claude Monet

Colors in vibration, peeling like silver bells and clanging like bronze bells, proclaiming happiness, passion and love, soul, blood and death.

Emil Nolde

I have always felt that in order to be a good painter one should be color-blind, because color doesn’t have to be seen. It only needs to be felt.

Richard Lindner

My personal theory is that being frugal with the number of colors, one gets to know them intimately and to understand how each reacts with the others.

Ron Ranson

Who told you that one paints with colors? One makes use of colors, but one paints with emotions.

Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin

Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.

Pablo Picasso

Each day has its own individuality of color.

Charles Hawthorne

Who told you that one paints with colors? One makes use of colors, but one paints with emotions.

Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin

How lovely yellow is! It stands for the sun.

Vincent van Gogh

Color Psycology

Color enriches our world and affects us emotionally, making us feel almost any emotion depending on which colors we are seeing. In this respect, color is not just something that is perceived, but is something that is felt, it is a sensation. Every color we experience affects us either subconsciously or consciously, as every color has associations and symbolic meaning to us. Below is a general look at colors and some of their associations and affects...

Adapted from Color Psychology and Color Theory,
by Faber Birren and Color Psychology, by Naomi Tickle

Color Associations

Electromagnetic Color

Four thousand years ago, the Egyptians built healing temples of light. Bathing a patient in specific colors of light produced different effects. Today we know that a blindfolded person will experience physiological reactions under different colored rays. In other words, the skin sees in technicolor.

This fact was confirmed by the noted neuropsychologist, Kurt Goldstein. In his modern classic, The Organism, he notes that stimulation of the skin by different colors leads to different effects. He states, “it is probably not a false statement to say that a specific color stimulation is accompanied by a specific response pattern of the entire organism.”

In order to understand this, we must begin with the fact that color is a form of visible light. It is electromagnetic energy. The graph below shows where color is positioned in the range of radiant energy.

The Electromagnetic Spectrum