My hometown house room was always painted in blue, ever since I know. There was a short period of time when it was painted in something between the orange and yellow color. At this period I noticed mood change, maybe because there was less light in a room, and it gave me ocassional headaches which went away with blue color restored.
While I was writing my history post today I noticed that colors always played a huge part in symbolism and always had a major role in a representative ascpect through flags, logos, menus, they influence our eating habits, mood and mental functions which is scientifically proven and widely accepted. The symbolism is actively the most important part of color(s). For example, the flag of France, the famous Tricolor:
The colors symbolize nobility (blue), clergy (white), and bourgeois (red), which were the estates of the old regime in France.
What would I like to know is, how colors became what they are now - colors?
Did our physical evolution followed colors, and gave them meaning tens of thousands years ago, when we had no psychological means to give colors written and toughtful explanations and symbolisms? Are we changing the perception of one color even today? The question is quite simple, how the symbolism of colors emerged and why did we gave every color a different meaning?
The view on color's symbolism is not globally one-minded. It's so diverse that, for example, we have stock-exchange in China where red color represents the uptrend and rising of the currency and white or green that represents falling and bearish trend.
In the USA and Europe the blue color represents sincerity, calm mind, but in Japan, it represents thievery. In Belgium they use pink color for boy's room and blue color for girls children.
Jan Van Eyck - Giovanni Arnolfini and his bride
The painting above is a matter of debate on topic of colors. It shows us how through "popular culture" (though in this period there wasn't one) specific colors gained universal meanings. On this painting - the green color, being the color of birth and fertility. Does it reflect the nature in spring and summer when the nature blooms? It's the most obvious explanation. Our bond with the nature is everlasting.
Is the same case with the blue color? The sky is blue, accumulating water that is to be dropped back to Earth. Oceans and rivers are blue, and our body consists 2/3 of water. Is this where our fascination with the blue color comes from?
Thinking about neutral colors as black and white, they have no too much reflection in nature if we don't count gray skies and other natural visual appearances, though they still made to our color list as very important. Our keyboards, TV's, LCD displays, smartphones and tablets. Refridgerators and other technology usually comes in neutral colors. Why? Because the neutrality of these colors has purpose of not affecting our perception of colors that are emerging on the screen. Imagine watching the TV with red plastics around it, it would be too distracting and even painful.
Interesting is that black is associated with death within almost every culture. Does it have something to do with the perception of death as an eternity of black / dark dream? Probably.
The machanism of how our eye is reproducting colors in our mind is amazing. Though in some scientific studies which I cannot recall right now, it is highly possible that the colors we see are not what they in reality. Elaborating this would be hard without that source but I think it has something to do with nerv signals and to which level of color detecting our brain has evolved.
Now, going further in symbolism. The purple color has also different meanings in different cultures. Some consider it as a color of nobillity, artists look upon purple as a color that triggers suicidal thoughts, even so, it was still in use today on some court ceremonials and in royal families.
Yellow color varies in symbolism. In China it is a color of nobility. In other cultures it usually represents happines and joy. But on traffic lights it represents caution. The same way Red goes from being associated to anger and stop sign in the West to health and joy in China. And this is mostly the generalized comparison. There are thousands of meanings of colors, and even millions of individual perceptions on colors and it's meaning.
Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul. - Wassily Kandinsky
One thing is for sure. Colors entered our lives through art and symbolism, remained for their usefulness and inspiring value.
