Red or blue??

What’s your favorite color? Mine are pink, purple, beige, magenta, peach, and I can keep going. Colors are a powerful tool to influence the feelings of an audience. For example, Picasso’s painting La Vie, it is a painting in different blue tones. The overall feeling of this painting is a cold environment, depression of the people in the background, and a sense of melancholy. The man in the foreground of the painting apparently points at the woman carrying the baby, which might have been taken away from the couple. These “cooler blues” give us a sense of tension and sadness; it can be also associated with “quieter, less-outgoing feelings” (Lauer, 283).

In contrast with the Picasso's painting the first impression of the painting by Nancy Dias, who called her piece Harlequin Macaw, is happiness. It made me think of a promising, enjoyable, exciting trip this bird is going to make. The life this bird is starting once he leaves his nest is a life full of exploration and new discoveries. The colors are radiant; the bright red, yellow, and green creates this painted bird. Lauer states “yellows, oranges, and reds give us an instinctive feeling of warmth and evoke warm, happy, cheerful reactions” in their audience (283).

So, how can some simple colors create this important effect on our emotions? We tend to associate our feelings and emotions through colors. The warm colors are the vibrant and exciting colors like yellow and red, and the cooler colors blue, gray, and black. Another reason for these effects is the way we observe our surroundings, a tendency we have to relate blue with water and ice or red and orange with fire. Therefore, we realize that blue is cold while red is a warm color.

References:

Design Basics by Lauer and Pentak

Photos:

http://www.nancydias.com/artwork_2007.htm

http://www.artquotes.net/masters/picasso/pablo_lavie1903.htm