Embodying Colours in Everyday Life

St Andrews can be brighter

One of my favourite novels, Still Life by A.S Byatt, depicts how colour becomes bodily. Warm tones signify desire and vitality, while luminous contrasts convey emotional exposure for the protagonist, Frederica. Intensifying life while simultaneously arresting it, colour becomes a marker of impermanence. In an interview, Byatt explained how in Ancient Rome, green and yellow probably meant blue while purple meant red, and she discussed how we have a ‘physical reaction to those words.’ Colour sits at the intersection of the physical world and human consciousness, as it is simultaneously a property of light and an experience of the mind. We are drawn towards colour. When I do not wear my glasses in town, all I see is a blend of colours, a blurred colour palette. My eyesight, like Monet’s impressionist pastels, where colour is used not to outline objects, but to capture fleeting light and atmosphere. Kandinsky was a firm advocate that colour had a spiritual and emotional vibration. For him, blue suggested depth and spirituality, yellow conveyed aggression, and red a form of vitality. Colour is more than visual, it is an autonomous quality dependent on our particular identities. The brain adjusts for lighting, fills in missing information, and compares surrounding colours (what is even more fascinating is tetrachromancy, where some individuals have four types of cones). In St Andrews, people tend to wear bright colours (given the town is rather grey and bleak in winter). More generally, we live in a world of minimalism, grey, urban concrete settings — and it is through the senses that colours provide us that we try to feel more alive. 

Movie colours have three main components, namely hue, saturation and darkness. This can create a colour scheme which can be monochromatic or with analogous colours. Back in the technicolour era in Hollywood throughout the 1940s and ‘50s, filmmakers used a special camera that split light into red, green, and blue components, recording them separately and then recombining them in printing. The result was intensely vivid, highly controlled colour unlike anything audiences had seen before. Colour was used as a dramatic tool to serve a narrative and sensory experience and emotional amplification. If scenes required more visual effects, contrasted paint shadows were used rather than natural light. Today, many have criticised so-called ‘Netflix lighting,’ with movies shot on volume LED panels that not only look fake but have no narrative coherence. Through light fixtures, it is easier to make flat and lifeless movies. So much time is spent on building decor sets for the colours to look lifeless on camera. In a way, movies started looking bad when cameras could see in the dark, where diffused bright lighting enabled the smoothing out of the skin to obliterate any form of imperfect texture. 

Techno raves subvert this, where our ways of capturing colours in the dark can’t be commodified. Colour becomes immersive, environmental, and almost metaphysical. In the 1990s, strobe lighting, laser systems, UV environments and LED technology marked the emergence of rave colour which pulsed, strobed, and flickered. Abandoned warehouses, power plants, and bunkers became spaces of sonic and visual transformation in cities like Berlin. Rave culture was often linked to ecstasy, which heightens sensory perception and emotional warmth. Colours appear more vivid, textures more luminous. But raving lighting is not something you look at; rather something you are inside of, as we crave an overwhelming, destabilising, and dissolving phenomenological experience of colour through events like Szentek or Waxrooms. Baudrillard described hyperreality, spaces where simulation replaces the ordinary real. The resurgence of film and digital cameras with saturated, bold colours testify of this need to bring back colour. Think of the popularity of A24 movies, which use vivid hues to enhance the narrative and visual experience. Animes and their neon palettes, fluorescent fractals, and hyper-saturated visuals create sensory overload as a post-psychedelia aesthetic, with sci-fi futurism and cyberpunk aesthetics. I personally have used a black and white background with huge police characters to make me appreciate the nature and art I consume. It has fixed my attention span and my attention to colour details. Colour theory is not futile; it has a way of changing how we perceive our surroundings and how we shine — look up your colour palette! 

Illustration by Abigail Svaasand