The Secret Life of Color

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Southern (Tunisian) Gardens Paul Klee 1919

“Colour possesses me. I don’t have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour. Colour and I are one. I am a painter.”
-Paul Klee, Tunisia

Isaac Newton changed forever our understanding of light and color when he split a ray of white light into its respective visible frequencies—a rainbow—and recombined them back into white light with two prisms. At that moment he intuited that color is a subjective perception made apparent by our eyes, not an immutable quality which “belonged” to objects. Light is color, and color makes beauty in our eyes.

Light is made of electromagnetic waves of different vibrational frequencies, which are themselves just a small part of the all-encompassing electromagnetic field which is our universe. Although we are generally unaware of it, the whole world is vibrating constantl…