the power of color

The problem with racism as the new thought-crime is that it’s not really about race,
or skin colour, it’s about power using colour.
When I look at someone, I see character not colour.
Dr. Gavin Ashenden

A page from Moses Harris’s The Natural System of Colors. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

As a high school art teacher, I always taught a color theory unit to my Art I classes
before letting everyone jump right into using color…be it colored pencils, pastels, paints, etc.
Color was much more complicated than just grabbing some paint and a brush…
and my anxious charges needed to understand such.

We would explore the whole physiology of how our eyes and brain see color and perceive color.
We talked about prisms, refraction and the bending of light.

We would talk about what it meant to be color blind…as several of my students were color
blind and how’d we’d work with that.
We even had blind students come to talk to those of us who could see about
how they actually perceived color.

We studied Joseph Albers, the father of color theory.

We talked about warm /hot colors, cool/cold colors, monochromatic colors,
polychromatic colors.
Even beginning with the simple word, chroma.

We studied the effects that color played in our psychological wellbeing and
how colors could actually affect our emotions.

And so yes, color is much more nuanced than simply consisting of primary and secondary colors.

I would place three cups of clear water on a desk.
Next, I would use food coloring and drop in enough drops to have a solid red cup
of water, a solid blue cup of water, and a solid yellow cup of water—our primary colors.
I would then put three empty cups on the table.
I would pour equal proportions of yellow and red into a cup to make orange,
blue and red to make purple, then blue, and yellow to make green–our secondary colors

I’d next pull out a new empty cup and pour a bit of each of the second set of colored water cups
into the last empty cup—coming up with a muddy brown yucky color what is known
as tertiary.
Something that happens when a bunch of colors are blended into one.

I’d explain that sometimes when we’d paint and mess up a color we were going for,
we would unintentionally make things worse when we kept trying to add more and more
different colors thinking we could ‘fix it’…less is more I would implore…

And so when I was reading Dr. Gavin Ashenden’s latest post, Resisting Group Think,
this whole business of color theory came racing back to my thoughts.

Our dear friend from across the pond is just about as baffled as I am
with the new intense obsession, our culture is now having with color.
But rather than paint, our culture is obsessed with skin…
and the color of that skin.
And that obsession with skin color has a dubious name…Racism.

Dr. Ashenden notes that…“racism morphed.
It moved from doing something to thinking something, and then much much worse,
it became someone thinking you thought something.
This summer everyone is guilty, if the new anti-racist posters are true:
“silence is violence.”

But I have three reasons for not believing in racism as people now accuse one another.
It’s not easy to tell what race someone is; there is a sliding scale of skin colour;
and there is a better, healthier way of describing why some people don’t like some other people.

The races are mixed for most of us. Last year I was bought a DNA kit for a birthday present.
It turns out I am roughly 30% Anglo-Saxon’ 30% Celt; and 20% Jewish
(with a bit of Russian thrown in -!) God forbid one racial bit of me should ever fall out
with one of the other bits. Does the Celt in me deserve reparations from my Anglo-Saxon
invader bit?
Don’t even start with the Jewish persecution stuff, the massacre in York in 1190,
the mass expulsion in 1290 by Edward 1st. Luther? Hitler?

And I’m white. But I have never thought of myself as white. This skin tone stuff is
equally confusing and on a sliding scale of pigment.
Megan Markle looks white to me. My more remote Aryan ancestors came from India.
When I look at someone, I see character not colour.

The problem with racism as the new thought-crime is that it’s not really about race,
or skin colour, it’s about power using colour.
It’s the imposing of the American cultural crisis on the rest of the world,
which has different cultural issues. It seems to be about transferring power
from ‘white’ (whatever that is) to black (whatever that is).

The worst thing about the new racism is that it uses a prism through which everything
and everyone are assessed through the lens of power.
This new language of power-relations replaces one moral world with another.
It changes our worth from what we do, and replaces it with what group we belong to.

We face a crossroads in morals and culture, and the new racism is
the tool used to shift the direction.

We are losing a simple and direct morality which invited you to love your neighbour
as yourself, and held you accountable if you failed or refused; we are replacing it
with thought-crime, collective guilt, censorship and the re-writing of history.

Resisting ‘group-think.’

And so we see that today’s culture indeed uses a prism in which to see…
but rather than bending light waves to see color…this prism bends peoples perceptions
to that of power and control.

I’m beginning to wonder if being color blind might not be the way we need to proceed…
yet we know that we have tied so much baggage to our ideas of societal color that we will
never be able to offload such a burden that we have created.

Unfortunately, I will never look at a color wheel the same, ever again.

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number,
from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,
standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes,
with palm branches in their hands,
Revelation 7:9

Color

We never really perceive what color is physically.
Josef Albers

A beautifully colored pansy in a pot by my front door.

Josef Albers, the German artist and educator, is considered the father of modern color theory. He was a leading professor at the cutting edge and prestigious Weimer Bauhaus which was both located in Weimer, later moving to Dreasau, Germany. Albers started working with stained glass, architecture, design and what we refer to today as the Arts and Crafts movement.

When I was in college, oh so many moons ago, I had to take a course in color theory. It was the work of Josef Albers that laid the foundation for the course. However it was his time at the Bauhaus that most intrigued me.

At the time, I was spending my summers in Black Mt, North Carolina as a camp counselor at Camp Merri Mac for girls. One day I will write a post about my time at Merri Mac. I’ve touched on Merri Mac and its importance in my life before when I wrote the post based on what lead me to want to teach. I am grateful for the summers I spent at Merri Mac as my time there helped to mould me, in part, into the person I am today.

The importance today, however, is not my time spent as a camp counselor at Merri-Mac but rather more importantly for the location of the camp, Black Mountain, North Carolina.

Throughout the 1920’s the German Bauhaus was considered a prestigious trade or vocational school. It was what we today refer to as a cutting edge or leading institution in the field of the education for the Arts. The ideas that were being generated at the Bauhaus helped to usher in the modernity of Architecture, Printmaking, Design and much of today’s Arts and Crafts movement. It was this emerging modern take on design which put all these German artists and the Bauhaus on a deadly collision course with Nazi Germany— which in turn would help changed the future of the Arts in the 20th century.

In 1933 Adolph Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. He was now on a rapid trajectory to take complete control over the physically and ego damaged nation of Germany. The current President of Germany, Paul von Hindenburg, an old feeble war hero, had unwisely thought that by appointing Adolph Hitler Chancellor– he’d be able to keep his thumb on this young charismatic hot head.

Hindenburg was physically and intellectually incapable of aiding his hurting nation. Germany was in the throws of a severe depression and was still licking its self esteem wounds from the fallout of WWI. Hitler’s National Socialist Workers Party, which morphed into what we all know as the NAZI party, skyrocketed to power along with Hitler. Their thuggish behavior of intimidation and violence, the Nazis were quick to cull any opposition, real or imagined, to its skewed belief system.

Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus had already left the school and fleed to the United States. Many of the remaining artists were forced to flee or face extreme repercussions / persecution as the Nazis came to power. Artwork, the life’s work of many of these artists were either confiscated or destroyed. Those who did not flee, or could not flee, were either imprisoned or sadly no other options but to take their own lives—the tragic fallout form the “State” deeming the art work obscene, grotesque, or in direct opposition to the new direction of Germany. Self expression was no longer acceptable.

Many of those artists and educators, who fled Germany, found their way to many prestigious Universities here in the Untied States such as Yale and Harvard. And yet there existed a vacuum that was to be filled by still many more of the Bauhaus faculty and alumni. The birth of the Black Mountain College, in tiny Black Mt, North Carolina, was a result from the fallout of the stifled art world in Nazi Germany.

It was during my time as a counselor at Merri Mac that I learned of the existence of the defunct Black Mt. College. It had long shuttered its doors by the time I found my way to Black Mt. The grounds of the school were now incorporated into our sister camp for boys, Camp Rockmont.

The following fall term of my senior year, I found myself having to write a paper for a senior level art ed course. I chose as my topic the birth and death of the Black Mountain College. It was a forgotten tale of war, loss, death, art and refuge. The shadows remained hidden in tiny Black Mountain. The quest for information was more rewarding than the paper itself.

Unfortunately this post does not have the capacity for me to explore and expound upon the sinister topic of the art world during Nazi Germany nor of the emergence of such artists here in the US as a direct result of the Nazi occupation of Germany. Names such as Albers, Gropius, Kandinsky, and Klee, to name but a few, became household names during the growing Modern and Post Modern art movements—with a small rural town in the mountains of southern Appalachia playing a key role. Perhaps this post is but to whet your appetite to delve further into this tiny forgotten piece of the history of art here in the United States.

Which all brings me back to the very beginning of this post and of the simple thought of color or colour. Josef Albers tells us that we never perceive what color is physically. Albers’ is an intellectual approach to color and the study of color. The play and pairing of various colors and intensities and what the eye perceives with often optical illusions coming to play. It is a fascinating study and Albers’ books are as popular as ever, even transcending to the new technological world with his work being transformed into cutting edge color Apps.

And yet I must take issue with Mr.Albers’ claim to a lack physical perception of color—my perception of color is much more simplistic than that of Mr Albers. I tend to be very literal in my perceptions of most of life. I look at the pansy in today’s post and I see an explosion of color. A play of violets, yellows, pinks and reds. I look at a pumpkin and I am engulfed with what I know to be pure orange. But what is orange but an equal mix of true red and true yellow. Two primary colors combining to form a secondary color, but to me, it is simply orange.

A granny smith apple is a color all its own. When I say Granny Smith, you visualize a yellow green apple. When I say pumpkin, you visualize orange. When I say brown, you visualize a leaf, dirt, the fur of an animal. When I say purple you visualize a grape….and so it goes. We associate color with physical objects.

So during this time of changing colors, otherwise known as Fall or Autumn, as you marvel in the turning of a green leaf to that of crimson, golden yellow, brilliant orange then to brown–or as you partake in the seasonal ritual of carving an overtly orange pumpkin–think of Josef Albers, the father of modern color theory, think of a tiny town in the mountains of North Carolina that took in the refugees of a tormented nation gone mad, and think of what the world of color brings to your daily world.

As we gaze on the Autumn landscape awash in its seasonal splendor, may we be mindful that perhaps there is more to this color business, we so relish, than we had ever imagined.