CA²RE / Høgh-Mikkelsen / Archive of Beautiful Colours

We have taught our children that red, yellow and blue are the three primary colours with which we can create all colours in the world1. We grew this rooted assumption when we as children ourselves dutifully tried to create the perfect twelve-part colour wheel2 from the teacher’s poor-quality paint in red, yellow and blue. We had a fuzzy sensation of not being able to fulfil the task while we struggled to mix the violet that would never glow; no matter how much blue or red we added, the blend stubbornly turned out more greyish than violet3.

Figure 1: The ‘Archive of Beautiful Colours’ is created in collaboration with a number of design professionals. The archive contains colour in three forms; ‘Colour Samples’, ‘Colour Compositions’ and ‘Colour in Context Photos’. For each colour the contributor has filled in an index card stating ‘How is this beautiful?’ Photo: Maria Høgh-Mikkelsen 2023

Figure 2: ‘Colour Compositions’. Photo: Maria Høgh-Mikkelsen 2023

Unlike the daring boy who exposed the emperor as a naked fool4 we dared not question the teacher’s authority and the proud artistic model he presented to us.

“I must be very bad at art”, we thought, instead of rightfully question the theory. Because, we were right in our experience of the phenomenon5: red, yellow and blue are not three primary colours with which we can create all colours in the world6.

Figure 3: ‘Colour Samples’. Photo: Maria Høgh-Mikkelsen 2023

Figure 4: ‘Colour Sample no. 001 41’. From the index card ‘How is this beautiful?’: This is yellow. If there is an archetype yellow – this, is it. It is warm, loud, persistent and fresh. The shiny surface of the material makes it even louder. It is a field of rapeseed; pure nature and it is contradictory artificial. This is yellow. Photo: Maria Høgh-Mikkelsen 2023

After the endeavour to mix the perfect colours, we were furthermore taught to use the colour wheel as an instrument to create harmony, taught that colours placed in a certain relation to each other in the wheel would be harmonious7, and thus, pleasing to look at. Again, the uncomfortable tingling from before would reappear as we once more witnessed the stripped emperor and struggled inside.

“I hate these colours together”8, we thought, while we obediently created a colour chord of three based on a triangle in the colour wheel.

“I like pink. In all its variations, from light, bold chewing gum pink to the deep and warm colours of my mother’s roses. I don’t like pink together with its complementary green. I love pink together with more pink.”9

And so, we continued to do as we were told and spread the doctrine of the three primary colours while we secretly collected beautiful colours in a box.10

Figure 5: ‘Colour in Context Photo no. 001 20’. From the index card ‘How is this beautiful?’: If light could be a colour sample, I would fill the archive with light. It looks as if the curtains in my summerhouse are on fire. The colours are alive, they move, blend, die and re-emerge. The curtains are coloured. The light affects these colours. The curtains also colour the light. I awake bathed in orange light. Photo: Maria Høgh-Mikkelsen 2023

This claim is based on observations in primary and secondary schools in Denmark and conversations with international design students at Design School Kolding supplemented by my own experience as a child and student.
The twelve-part colour wheel is created by Johannes Itten while he developed and taught the mandatory, preliminary course, the Bauhaus ’Vorkurs’, from 1919 to 1922 (Wagner 2019). The colour wheel is presented in Ittens book “The Art of Color” published in 1961 almost forty years after his engagement with the Bauhaus School (Itten 1961)
“Defined in this manner, the primary colours, however, cannot produce the mixtures given in the illustration in Itten’s book” (Arnkil 2013: 88). It is not possible to produce the violet colour with the warm red colour, also known as vermillion, that Itten has defined as his primary red. Professional artists must always have two of each of the three primary colours for example a warm and a cold red.
The boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Emperor's New Clothes’ represents a phenomenological approach to research; he reacts on what he experiences instead of what people believe to be true.
I apply a phenomenological approach in my PhD aiming to describe phenomena as they appear too us through our lived experience rather than explain them through objective and abstract means. I lean on Heidegger (1967), Böhme (eg. 2017) and Van Manen (2014).
Other colour systems have other primaries: our printers use cyan, magenta, yellow and black as primary colours and our computer screens red, green and blue.
Itten proposes that harmonic colour combinations can be created by placing geometrical forms in the colour wheel (Itten 1961) and as such his ideas lean on the Pythagorean tradition of the divine beauty of mathematics, cf. the golden ratio (Lippmann 1964). Itten argues that these colour chords represent an objective colour harmony. In same text he also acknowledges subjective preferences towards colour. His experiments with subjective colour inspired the fashion phenomenon of colour tests based on the four seasons (Jackson 1981).
Today O’Connor suggest a contemporary model or formular for colour harmony: ‘Colour harmony = f (Colour strategy X) x (ID + CE + CX + PE + TI)’ where ID is age, gender, preferences etc, CE is cultural colour beliefs and symbols, CX is context, PE is perceptual effects and TI is temporal impact factors such as colour trends (O’Connor 2019). O’Connor acknowledges individual colour preferences but maintain the notion of ‘harmony’.
I use autoethnographic methods, such as fictional writing (Ellis 2004) in my research to bring to light nuances overlooked by science. My choice of using autoethnographic methods is inspired by feminist theory claiming that “(…) the ideological doctrine of scientific method and all the philosophical verbiage about epistemology were cooked up to distract our attention from getting to know the world effectively (…)” (Haraway 1988: 577)
In the PhD project I have conducted an experiment called ’Personal Colour’. It investigates an intuitive and sensual basis for the work with colour design - as opposed to a dogmatic quest for harmony. As part of the ‘Personal Colour’ experiment I am building an ’Archive of Beautiful Colours’ together with a group of design professionals, engaging with them through ‘Cultural Probes’ (Gaver et al 1999) and poetic writing. The archive consists of three types of colours; ‘Colour Samples’, ‘Colour Compositions’ and ‘Colour in Context Photos’.

Literature

Arnkil, Harald (2013) Colours in the visual world. Aalto: Aalto University Publication

Böhme, Gernot (2017) The Aesthetics of Atmosphere. New York: Routledge.

Ellis, Carolyn (2004) Writing a Methodological Novel Thinking Like an Ethnographer Writing Like a Novelist. In: The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. pp.330-350

Gaver, B., Dunne, T. and Pacenti, E. (1999) Design: Cultural probes. In: Interactions 6, 1 (Jan./Feb. 1999), 21–29. https://doi.org/10.1145/291224.291235

Haraway, Donna (1988) Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. In: Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 575-599

Heidegger, Martin (1967) Being and time. Oxford: Blackwell.

Itten, Johannes (1961) The art of color: the subjective experience and objective rationale of color. New York: Rheinhold Publishing

Jackson, C. (1981) Color Me Beautiful: Discover Your Natural Beauty Through the Colors That Make You Look Great and Feel Fabulous. Ballantine Books.

Lippman, Edward A., 1964, Musical Thought in Ancient Greece, New York: Columbia University Press.

O’Connor, Zena (2019) Colour harmony: a 2020 perspective. Conference paper. Proceedings of the International Colour Association (AIC) Conference 2019, Buenos Aires.

Van Manen, Max (2014) Phenomenology of Practice. New York: Routledge.

Wagner, Christoph (2019) Johannes Itten. Munich: Hirmer Verlag