The Perception of Color – How Colors Feel to Me

For me, colors aren't simply there to be seen. I feel them. They have character, mood, sometimes even something like an attitude. My relationship with them is nothing fixed; it has likes and dislikes and changes over the years. Perhaps that's why I perceive colors a little differently than most people. Let me try, for once, to put it into words.

Colors in phases of life

I notice it most clearly in the way my colors come and go. As a child I had a favorite color, and it stayed that way well into adulthood: a blue that accompanied me for a very long time. At some point it was replaced by lilac, all on its own.

Yellow, on the other hand, I couldn't stand for a long time. Until my last pregnancy it almost made me feel sick. And today I love a clear lemon yellow and let other yellow tones into my palette too. I'm sure that this, too, is only how I feel right now and will shift again in a later phase of life. So my colors travel along with me, and with them travels what they stir in me.

I see this intensity in my children too, by the way. For them a favorite color is never just a favorite color, but something they experience with their whole being. Perhaps this way of feeling color simply runs in our family.

Colors that feel like emotions

Because some colors I carry within me less as color than as feeling. Orange, to me, is very loud and a little intrusive. Violet feels like envy and resentment. Pink, by contrast, is courage for life and a certain daring, a color that dares something. It may sound strange, but to me it's entirely coherent. When I say a tone is warm or cool, that naming feels completely natural, almost as if there were nothing to think about.

I smell flowers, not colors

It isn't only feelings I connect with colors, but, in a way all its own, scents too. Bare colors I don't actually smell. But I smell flowers when I paint them or see them in a picture. It works most strongly with roses, with peonies and with rosemary. It's not a trick and not imagination, it simply happens. Perhaps that's the reason I can immerse myself so deeply in a single bloom while painting.

When numbers have a color

And there's something else I long took to be completely normal: for me, numbers have very particular colors too. The one, the three, the seven, each carries its own tone for me, quite naturally and always the same.

Behind this lies something called synesthesia. In some people two senses or perceptions are more closely wired together in the brain than usual, so that one automatically awakens the other. That's how I smell flowers from a picture, and how I see numbers in color. I don't have to think about it and I can't switch it off, it's simply there. For a long time I was convinced everyone experienced it this way. Today I know it's a small extra window through which I look at the world.

The search for the perfect violet

This precise, almost physical way of experiencing color sometimes makes me lose myself in a single tone. Once I had a phase in which I searched for the perfect violet. It was meant to be a warm, delicate cobalt violet, on no account the cold one. On this search I ended up with ultramarine pink and manganese violet and tried the tones across all the brands. Which colors really stayed in my box in the end, I've shown in My Perfect Color Palette.

Do I perhaps see more than others?

It was during that very search that I came across a word that hasn't let go of me since: tetrachromacy. Most people have three kinds of color receptor in the eye and see the world in millions of shades. Tetrachromats have a fourth kind and could, in theory, distinguish many times more, nuances that most of us simply have no sense for. This particularity occurs almost exclusively in women, and one usually only knows for certain after elaborate testing.

Whether I truly belong to them, I can't say, and I don't want to adorn myself with it. I only know that I perceive finer differences than almost everyone I know. Where others see a single pink, I often see three. That's exactly why I never paint by rule, but always by this very precise feeling. Sometimes I wish everyone could feel this way. And then I remember again that this way of seeing is something like a quiet superpower, and I wouldn't give it up for anything in the world.

Everyone lives in their own world of color

And yet color is nothing you can rely on forever. One thought even frightens me a little. Over the years the lens in the eye slowly yellows, almost like a window grown old, and blue and violet then become harder and harder to tell apart. Of all things, my beloved lilacs and violets could slip away from me a little in time. The idea of one day seeing fewer colors is one I can hardly bear to follow.

Perhaps that's why that one photo of a dress, which went around the world a few years ago, touches me so much. Some see white and gold in it, others a dark blue, and no one can convince the other. The reason lies not in the dress but in our heads. Our brain adds in the light it assumes the dress is in, and depending on how it does that, each of us sees a different color. To me that's the loveliest proof that color doesn't simply lie out there in the world, but comes into being within us. We all live in a world of color entirely our own. And perhaps that's exactly why I paint: to make mine visible, just a little, the way I see it, for as long as I can see it.