sketchbook

Intense colors seem so far to be strongly associated with joy. I’m thinking of rainbows, candy, and balloons, but also sea, sun, and sky. When asked which color they associate with joy, people have been mentioning a wide range of hues - reds, yellows, blues, violets, but they are all very pure and saturated - no grayishness, no tinting, no muddiness.

I have also been wondering if there is something about natural color that is joyful. The colors of nature are often intense but rarely flat. Of course, the rainbow is natural, and these colors are are pure as it gets. But there’s something in the quality of the color too.

Color theorists talk about different kinds of color to differentiate, say, the blue on your shirt from the blue of the sky. They might be exactly the same hue/saturation/value combo, but they’ll still be different. The blue of your shirt is called surface color, because it’s applied to a surface and can be understood in the context of space. The color in the sky has no spatial information to it; you can’t tell where it comes from or where it’s located, how close the source is or how far. That kind of color is called film color, which I always remember because it’s kind of filmy and intangible. There’s something fascinating about film color, because you can’t really put your finger on it, nor can you reproduce it. There’s also illumination color, like the color of sunlight, which is even less tangible and equally as intriguing, because its color affects all the other colors around it.

Sunlight also comes up frequently in discussions of joy, and I wonder if this intangible color idea has a connection to the idea of expectations disruption which is one of many ideas I have around what causes us to feel joy. There is something about pleasurable things that seem out of step with the laws of nature that govern our everyday existence, like rainbows, buoyancy, bubbles, snowflakes, and flying, that seems to trigger joy, especially in children. These laws of nature form a certain kind of expectation. Of course we know that these occurrences can be explained by physics, but our physical experience of them, particularly the very first time, is magical. I wonder if the same principle applies to the color in the sky or of sunlight, and if these colors are not more joyful because of their elusiveness.