Color Theory Study
This week I continued to read Designing Design by Kenya Hara. No surprise, I was not able to fully understand the meaning of his deep-thought words. As for reading, I got lost at some points though, the following words I put here gave me a unique perspective of viewing colors in the world. You might know about white, but what if we see it as a design concept? Since then, I think taking something that we think we already know and making it unknown thrills us anew with its reality and deepens our understanding of it.
White is a color from which color has escaped, but its diversity is boundless.
White is not white. The receptivity that senses white is what gives birth to whiteness. So we cannot look for white. We need to search instead for a way of feeling that will sense white. Depending on this search, for the receptivity that senses white, we will be able to aim our consciousness towards a white that is a little whiter than the average white. With that ability, we will become conscious of white. And then we will become aware of white enmeshed in an incredible diversity in the world’s many cultures. We will become able to understand words like "tranquility," or "emptiness," and discern the meanings dormant within them. As we turn our attention toward white, the world gathers more light, and shadows deepen in degree.
White is easily soiled and is hard to keep clean. White impresses us as more beautiful still thanks to our feelings of empathy towards anything transient.
When I act in concert with a consciousness that is subtly receptive to white, and in that state of mind look at architecture, spaces, books, or gardens, I feel as if I am able to make sense of all kinds of things. I believe white is a special message meant just for the roots and trunk of human sensibility.
Color is not just visual, but something relating to all of our perceptions.
If you mix together all the colors of light, they become white. If you discard all the colors in paint or ink, they also become white. White is a synthesis of all colors and, at the same time, the lack of color, achromatic. As a color that escapes color, it is a special one. Put another way, color is no more than a single aspect of white. Insofar as it avoids color, and thus more strongly awakens physicality, it is materiality; like empty space or a margin, it is pregnant with time and space. It even entails abstract concepts like absence and absolute zero.
Just as we say that everything returns to the earth, an infinite number of activities and inspiring experiences mingle in the accumulation of time, eventually swirling into brown, seen from a macroscopic perspective of time. From this viewpoint, the earth appears in camouflage. Mix it even more and the colors connecting life change into a chaos of gray. But chaos is not death. The energy of the dazzling colors will quicken, and from within the chaos, a completely new color will be born again.
White is something that cannot be realized in an actual world. We may feel as if we have seen or touched white, but this is an illusion. White in the real world is categorically soiled; it is merely the trace of the aspiration towards white. White is delicate and easily damaged. Even at the moment of its birth, it is not a perfect white. It is already soiled to a degree that we cannot even sense it when we touch it. And yet this gives white all the more prominence in our consciousness.
White exists on the periphery of life. First, milk is white. Giving suck, for animals, is a vital activity, one that passes the life of a parent to its offspring. The whiteness of breast milk is a shared trait among human beings and other mammals. Milk carries an abundance of nourishment for life itself, so the white we call "milk-white" is one that in our minds is cloudy with organic matter. The taste of breast milk is likewise the taste of “milk-white” and of organic matter. It is fascinating that the food of life, that which drips from the nipple, is white.
Many eggs are also white. It’s not that white birds lay white eggs; blue birds, black birds, even alligators, and snakes lay eggs of pale white. Within this white dwell a real-life, and when it comes into the world, breaking the shell of the egg, the membrane between that world and this, it is no longer white, but the color of a living creature. Could this mean that all animals, born into this world as living entities, have already begun their journey towards chaos?
White lies on the brim of the image of life, that is, of information, which has soared up out of great chaos. Chaos is like the world and white is like a map or a figurative representation. Mapping the world, or generating figurative representations, is graphic design. White is the original form of life.
Here are some of my practice in color theory.
Monochrome book cover design
Two complimentary plus tint postal stamp design
Bradbury Thompson zine
Color perception
Continuous line illustration
Animated Warhol portrait