Goethe was a man of extraordinary range. Born into a comfortable, well-educated family, he trained formally in law and spent years in government service as a diplomat and adviser to the Duke of Weimar. But his lasting fame came from a different vocation entirely; he rose to prominence in his twenties as a poet and novelist, and by the time he turned to color, he was already one of the most celebrated intellectuals in Germany, a leading voice of the Sturm und Drang movement that prized feeling, individual genius, and the full expression of human sensibility over cold formality.

This is the important thing to understand about the kind of artist Goethe was. He collected art enthusiastically, and he sketched and painted for pleasure, using watercolors to illustrate his own color experiments. Yet he never considered himself a visual artist, and color, for him, was never an artistic medium to work with. His art was language; his instrument was argument, observation, and reflection carried out in prose. Where a painter might portray a color relationship on canvas, Goethe described it lyrically in a sentence. He was an artist of words, not an artist of paint — a distinction his critics, and even some of his admirers, have often collapsed.

It was this same Romantic sensibility, not scientific training, that shaped his approach to color. Goethe opposed what he saw as science's desire for reduction: its drive to explain the full richness of natural experience in purely mechanistic terms, stripped of feeling and immediacy. Against this, he held up human observation itself as the true measure of things, not an instrument's reading, but the embodied interaction between a person, their senses and the world. It was this conviction, more than any specific disagreement over optics, that set him on a collision course with Newton, and that shaped everything that follows.

Goethe’s 1400 page treatise, Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours) was published in 1810. While Newton experimented solely with the physical properties of color (light passing through a prism or striking a surface), Goethe’s color theories were based holistically on the combination of physical color, surrounding conditions of light and dark, physiological reactions in the human visual apparatus and the psychological effect of color, effects related to the way our brains process information

Therefore, according to Goethe, the total experience of color depends on the object’s color, the lighting conditions and the human perceptual and sense-making apparatus — with the sum being greater than the parts.

As we learned previously, Goethe erred in his Faustian desire, by insisting that his color work be taken seriously as science, when in fact, his findings were subjective, and derived in service of his own ends. However, if we strip away the pretense towards science, Goethe had many insightful and valuable observations about color. Now, we can look at Goethe’s positive contributions to color theory.

We can start at the beginning with Light and Dark. Goethe believed color arose from the interaction of light and darkness, and the polar opposites of white and black; and while he was wrong about the cause, he was right about the experience.

Color varies broadly between the two poles of light and dark. Light colors are bright, positive and forward, while dark colors are cool, calm and receding. For Goethe, this meant the first primary color was yellow, since it is the brightest color, next to white, which to him was a polar point of revelation in its interaction with darkness. “Colour itself is a degree of darkness," he wrote, meaning that darkness against light is what generated the experience of color.

Yellow and blue were, to Goethe, the Urfarben, the true primaries, the two poles from which all other color was generated. Each intensifies (Steigerung) toward red as it darkens — yellow reddening, blue reddening — until the two extremes meet. Notably, red itself never appears in the wheel as its own starting point — it exists only as a polar force acting on each primary color. Purpur is the apex where these two reddened extremes meet, the point where they fuse into something that belongs to neither primary alone.

Here, we encounter color's intrinsic mystery, the gap between color naming and experience. Significantly, there is a translation gap, where Goethe's Purpur was rendered by Charles Eastlake into English as 'purple,' when in fact it is closer to red, or in a more interesting interpretation — magenta.

Goethe himself described Purpur as the color of a cardinal's carmine robes and the ancient murex dye — in his own terms, a red with no trace of yellow or blue in it, which is not the blue-leaning 'purple' we know today.

Let’s explore this idea: remember previously that Newton took the linear color spectrum and wrapped it into a circle, as a means of representing color relationships. While physically illogical, the key benefit of this arrangement is to make visible the opposition of colors, including ‘complementary’ colors.

It’s also important to remember that the color circle has never belonged to artists alone. Scientists, philosophers, dyers, and mystics have all used it as a way to visualize color relationships — interpreting it as needed to fit their own purposes.

In this case, Goethe was constructing a color circle that represented his philosophy of color, and the relationships between colors. That he illustrated his philosophy with a diagram rendered in watercolor makes it look, at a glance, like a practical tool for mixing paint. It is nothing of the kind.

Instead, Goethe’s philosophical color arrangement points at something more abstract and interesting. Here, we must re-examine the idea of the color circle more closely; in order to ‘close’ the ends, which are really the endpoints on the visible spectrum next to infrared and ultraviolet, a ‘synthetic’ color must be created, that is , one that doesn’t exist on the visible spectrum, which we know today as magenta — which is actually an optical mixture of blue and red.

While it took a later generation of scientists to describe this aspect of human color perception, Goethe was representing it in his conceptual color wheel as Purpur, an emergent color caused by the interaction of the two color primaries. Now, if we ignore Goethe’s incorrect assertion about blue and yellow primaries and instead look at this color as being the mixture of two endpoints, we can understand it in a way that is fully congruent with modern color theory.

Look at the Colormxr illustration below, showing an RGB+CMY color circle rotated to match Goethe's intent, with purpur / magenta on top. That identification — Purpur as magenta, not red — is confirmed by Grün / green in Goethe's original diagram, which he placed directly opposite it as its Gegenfarbe. Green is magenta's complement in modern color theory. This pairing proves which color Goethe actually meant, which supersedes translational and visual interpretations.

Now, we need to return to Goethe’s philosophical color construct, in which, it is popularly (mis)understood, that Goethe placed red at the top, as the superior color, above all others. This seems like a pretty common sense claim, in that red is an extremely vibrant color, associated with fire and energetic projection. However, if we read it in a different way, the philosophic angle becomes much more compelling.

The top of Goethe’s color circle, chosen by him for philosophical reasons, is not actually primary (for us) red, but Purpur, which is not actually purple but an intermixture of red and blue, aka magenta. Why is this claim so noteworthy? Because magenta has a mystical property — you can’t find it using a prism, it is not a color found in nature; instead, it is a union of two disparate colors, at the opposite ends of the spectrum, which are united here via ‘the alchemy of color.’ Goethe was describing a mystical union of color, created from the interaction of two opposites, which revealed an emergent phenomenon of color.

The orientation of Goethe's own manuscript diagram quietly carries this meaning; yet, it is often misrepresented as red due to the limits of color reproduction and understanding. Furthermore, if you search for his color wheel today, you will see examples where his color circle was rotated so green, or another color is on top, an indication that the poster didn’t fully understand Goethe’s theory of colors.

In addition, there is also the microcosm-macrocosm move at the heart of Goethe’s natural philosophy. encapsulating his main philosophical (and alchemical) tenets, polarity (Polarität) and intensification (Steigerung), which were Urphenomenon, the foundation of his entire worldview, underlying plant morphology, anatomy, geology and nature in general. In Goethe’s analysis, across his studies in these areas, two opposing poles interact and by doing so, intensify their characteristics, resulting in a transformative union.

And this is where the alchemical and metaphysical converge, the coniunctio (union of opposites, producing transformation) that Ronald Gray identified in Goethe's color work; it isn't a separate, add-on alchemical reading bolted onto an otherwise secular scientific theory — it's the same structure as the Polarität/Steigerung method itself, just named differently by two different traditions.

Goethe's youthful alchemical education was more than just a curiosity. Instead it informed his worldview in life, giving him the syntax of the Great Work as an intellectual framework. Therefore, Purpur isn't just a color Goethe placed at the top of a wheel, it's the one point in his entire body of work where his philosophy achieves exactly what it was always trying to do everywhere else. Its hidden roots are exposed in the light of alchemical transformation, where opposites unite to create something greater than the sum of its parts, not addition, but ascension.

So far, we have viewed Goethe’s life and work from many different angles, each providing a different insight into his wide ranging accomplishments. Going deeper than his Faustian desire to have his color theories validated by the scientific community, what is revealed is a humanistic approach to color as a holistic experience and color theory that represents richer philosophical and alchemical principles. In this light, Goethe actually delivers something more essential about color than is otherwise known about him biographically. Read properly, his color theory is not a practical artist’s guide to mixing colors, but a deeper reading of color interaction — informed by alchemy.

In our next act, next we will examine the legacy of Goethe’s color theories and their influence on visual arts.

Previously in our search for the alchemy of color, we met Goethe through the dark lens of his failure in the scientific world. This is an ironic and unfortunate legacy, yet a poetic one that should not diminish his many accomplishments. The greatest minds are often those that are most capable of overreach, to see great heights only to long for greater visions of what lies behind and above.

This episode will examine the alchemy of color allegorically, through the looking glass viewing Goethe as the personage of his most famous work, the epic poem and play, Faust, which is itself based on a classic German fable:

According to legend, Faust was a brilliant and successful man, who yet was unsatisfied with his accomplishments, and thus sought to make a deal with the devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited worldly knowledge and pleasures. His downfall was his elevation of human knowledge above the divine. A brilliant scholar, Faust was embittered by the limits of science, theology, and the humanities — and in Goethe’s version, the traditions of theology, philosophy, medicine, magic and alchemy.

The story of Faust has been told and retold, and yet Goethe’s version was so epic that it has become synonymous. It is a story with profound moral and spiritual lessons, unfortunately outside of our scope here. In our short time, the goal is to examine the allegory of Faust with Goethe’s own experience with color.

Previously, we learned of Goethe’s historic quarrel with Newton, and the cost to his credibility. With all the arrogance of Faust, Goethe ironically accused Newton publicly of placing scientific theory above human sensory experience:

Goethe was convinced that Newton's experimental methods and geometrical models of color mixture were a kind of falsehood machine, a delusional maze, an insane and malign procedure for fabricating nonsense that caused many scientists of his time literally to abandon their senses. For Goethe, the sensory experience of color was the fundamental basis for his science, and sensory experience was equivalent to reality.
— Bruce MacEvoy

This is a remarkable statement by one of Goethe’s contemporary critics, because, among other implications, it locates Goethe within the tradition being described by The Alchemy of Color. Goethe explicitly champions the human sensual perception of color. Goethe’s methods of investigation were primarily intuitive, rooted in Nature, and aimed at a holistic explanation of color perception beyond surface properties.

Many of Goethe’s critics have been baffled by his seemingly quixotic approach, and unconvinced by his wooly explanations of physical phenomena. Yet, when viewed from the perspective of alchemy, this characterization turns instead to a pursuit of the alchemical foundations of color experience.

While Goethe is well known for his accomplishments in many fields, what is less well known is that he had an education in alchemy, and, in fact, it informed much of his life’s work. Goethe's connection to alchemy and hermeticism began during a convalescence in his early twenties, when he studied alchemical and mystical texts alongside his mentor Susanne von Klettenberg, including Georg von Welling's Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum et Theosophicum, and works by Paracelsus, Basil Valentine, Jan Baptist van Helmont, and Jakob Böhme. This wasn't passive reading; he worked hands-on in a private laboratory under Welling's guidance, producing substances like liquor silicum.

What he retained were the concepts at the root of alchemy: opposing forces and the process of transformation. In the case of his color studies, Goethe equated the appearance of color ‘polarities’ (the special visual quality of opposing colors) with the quality of ‘attractiveness’ which was also present in a magnetic field. This is the heart of Goethe’s conception of ‘magnetic’ colors.

At the center of that early study sat a single idea: that everything meaningful in nature arises from opposition — light against dark, force against counter-force; with full being realized only in conjunction with stands against it. This was not incidental to the alchemical texts Goethe read; it was foundational organizing logic. Sulfur and mercury, sun and moon, fixed and volatile. Alchemy's entire vocabulary is built on paired opposites that must come into contact before anything new can emerge.

Goethe carried this habit of mind into everything he studied afterward, color included. His famous claim that yellow is light softened by darkness, and blue is darkness weakened by light, is not simply a physical description, it is the same alchemical logic of opposition, restated as optics. Where Newton saw color as something already contained within light, waiting to be separated out, Goethe saw it as something generated — the product of two opposing forces meeting at a boundary, exactly as his youthful reading had taught him how nature works.

Alchemical tradition describes the Great Work as a sequence of color stages the base matter passes through on its way to perfection:

Nigredo - a blackening, the material broken down to its raw state
Albedo - a whitening, the purification that follows
Citrinitas - the yellow operation, the awakening of matter
Rubedo - a reddening, the final stage marking completion — the achievement of the Philosopher's Stone itself.

In his 1952 book Goethe the Alchemist, Ronald Gray makes the connection explicitly, arguing that Goethe's own elevation of purpur, the reddish violet which he placed at the culmination of his color circle as the union of both poles of the spectrum, echoes this same alchemical structure: not just one hue among others, but as the point where opposition resolves into completion.

If Gray is right, Goethe wasn't just borrowing alchemy's logic of opposites for his color theory — he was, consciously or not, giving that opposition the same ending the alchemists always gave it. Purpur isn't an arbitrary stopping point in his system; it's occupying the same structural role — completion, culmination — that rubedo occupies in the Great Work.

Returning to the Faustian theme, Goethe himself was frustrated with what he saw as the limits of scientific knowledge, convinced of the superiority of his own intellect and his own way of seeing. Faust, too, was no stranger to any of this. When Goethe's play opens, Faust is not a young man setting out, but an old one looking back, a scholar who has mastered philosophy, law, medicine, and theology, and finds himself no closer to what he actually wanted, which was never facts, but understanding; not information but the thing itself.

A lifetime of learning has left him standing exactly where he started. It is this restless despair, not simple ambition, that opens the door to Mephistopheles — a man who has exhausted every way of knowing and yet yearns for more. This yearning is not a flaw to be corrected; it is the engine of the whole story, the thing that makes the bargain not just possible but necessary — to Faust and Goethe alike.

Something in the experience of color reaches people, and drives some of them to want to go further into it; the scientist reaches for it through explanation, the artist through recreation, the rest of us simply by surrounding ourselves with colors that speak to us.

Goethe wanted all three at once: to explain color, to feel it, and to be believed as an authority. So he took his case to the public, staking his reputation on the wager that all three could be held by one man, in one lifetime, in one book.

Whether he actually held all three, or only ever grasped one, is the question the rest of this story arc has to answer.

The search for the alchemy of color has taken many forms. In its purest original sense, the alchemist’s search for The Philosopher’s Stone was a search for a unifying, generative principle capable of explaning and transmuting everything else — the prima materia. Newton came close by splitting white light into the color spectrum, which was foundational in defining the physical origin of color. Following Newton, another polymath attempted to define the prima materia of color, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Goethe was a man of many talents, a novelist, poet, philosopher, and natural scientist (and, interestingly, a Freemason). Highly educated, well traveled and with a wide range of interests, Goethe is rightly considered one of the great minds of mankind.
With a protean work output, and most famous for his epic poem, Faust, Goethe himself considered his book Zur Farbenlehre (On Chromatics or The Theory of Colours) to be his magnum opus, a volume containing Goethe’s experiments with the physiological perception of color, and expounding on his metaphysical theory of color’s origin, and the psychological / moral system of color classification.

Never known for his humility, Goethe described himself as, “the only person in this century who has the right insight into the difficult science of colors, that is what I am rather proud of."

Goethe’s legacy in color is large, but complicated. How close did he come to the alchemy of color?

Just as Newton sought correspondence in physics, Goethe was preoccupied with philosophy, with a worldview of God as master technician. Thus, Goethe’s conception of light and dark was not purely based in physics, but in metaphysics, and the historical legacy of Aristotle.

One of Goethe’s significant contributions to the study of color were his writings on the psychology of color. Guilty of intellectual overreach and misplaced confidence, Goethe overextended himself to attribute certain human personality traits to colors.

Goethe and his collaborator, Friedrich Schiller extended ancient Greek medical theory into what they called the Temperament Rose (shown above), mapping the entire color spectrum onto the four humoural types, then further subdividing each temperament into specific human roles or archetypes (tyrants and heroes under choleric, poets and lovers under sanguine, teachers and historians under phlegmatic, philosophers and pedants under melancholic).

For example, he described pure red as a hue that “conveys an impression of gravity and dignity” — one of the traits he mapped onto the “choleric personality” type in his broader scheme linking the twelve hues to the ancient four temperaments (choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic) that were defined by the ancient Greeks.

We can see more evidence of his color overreach with the ‘Goethe Triangle’ studies. Despite popular belief, Goethe himself never used the color triangle form; instead, later generations mapped his classificiations onto the triangle (a well known color illustration method), producing very authoritative diagrams of color relationships.

Popularized by the artist and educator Carry van Biema in her 1930 book, Farben Und Formen Als Lebendige Kräft, the ‘Goethe Triangle’ represents Goethe’s psychology of color even if he did not create it directly; the color diagrams are meant to illustrate vibrant (leuchtend), severe (ernst), and powerful (mächtig) color combinations. While one may instinctively and generally relate these color combinations to Goethe’s definitions, in fact they are closer to horoscopes — generalized statements that invite the viewer to read their own truth into them.

Note: I am greatly condensing the information around the ‘Goethe Triangle.’ For a deeper dive into this topic, see this excellent article: Goethe’s Color Triangle - A Didactic Phantom

What is obvious in retrospect is the mapping of color on to the human personality is extremely subjective. Unfortunately, there is a long history of pseudoscience in this area, where confident definitions are made about the symbolism and physiological effects of color. In hindsight, it is easy to see how these assertions are culturally biased, and are little more than poetic license applied to color. Goethe, however, with the confidence of his supreme intellect, was certain about his assertions.

This is the first visual in The Alchemy of Color that represents a seductive but dangerous illusion; a visual arrangement of colors that assumes an air of authority, and so is received as fact by the viewer. This is how confident but faulty assertions about color have been passed down through generations.

Despite his background in the humanities, Goethe considered his color investigations to be scientific, and demanded that his findings be treated as such. He set himself up in opposition to Newton, contending against Newton’s experimental findings that colors are properties of light, by declaring that colors resulted from the interplay of light and darkness, and attempting to back up this assertion with his own phenemonological findings.

Goethe experimented with a prism, but used his observations to arrive at a different conclusion, which supported his hypothesis. His prism observations followed the same logic: color appears at light-dark edges — white above dark stretches a blue-violet edge into the dark, dark above light stretches a red-yellow edge into the light — and he held that the spectrum itself was a combination of these simpler edge effects, making Newton’s spectrum a derived phenomenon rather than fundamental.

The above image, adapted from Plate IV, Figures 1 and 2 of Zur Farbenlehre, was presented by Goethe as proof of his theories. Scientists of the day were unconvinced, and thoroughly debunked this example, by noting, among other problems, that his observations were based on a fixed viewing length, while different viewing lengths did not support his hypothesis. Thus, despite his fervent desire, Goethe’s color work was dismissed as science.

Note: I am greatly condensing both Goethe’s work, the color theory and history surrounding it. For a deeper dive into this topic, see this excellent Theory of Colours analysis.

At a higher level, we can see the arc from natural philosophy to alchemy to science; the study of natural philosophy is largely observational, while alchemy attempted by diverse means to discover and derive the base elements that cause natural phenomena, while science evolved as a codified methodology for investigating and quantifying hypotheses in order to arrive at conclusions with repeatable results.

Science can thus be described as a form of unequivocal knowing. It is authoritative in a material sense. The certainty of science and the results derived from its findings has elevated science to a position higher than other forms of investigation, which hinge on less rigorous or proveable means. So, there is an implicit bias towards scientific thought as being superior, a higher bar of truth.

The means also matter, with objective experimentation winning out over personal observation and logical thought. It’s no wonder then, that during the Enlightenment through the present day, that great minds would gravitate towards science as being the pinnacle.

Goethe certainly thought so, and sacrificed his reputation attempting to summit the science world.

The primacy of science from the age of Enlightenment until now has been so strong that its quest for quantified objectivity has obscured other paths to understanding. Science can measure, define, and predict a great deal; but there is much it cannot capture. It can explain color after the fact, and it can explain a color in isolation; it cannot manifest the experience of color. This represents the limits of science.

The Alchemy of Color is the phrase I’ve coined as a means of symbolizing the experience of color; for me, the alchemy of color is experiential, and not something that can be arrived at scientifically or mathematically. That is to say, it exists as an outcome of experience, rather than a formula. The scientist can formulate colors, but they can’t formulate the experience of colors. This experience is the domain of the viewer and the artist.

So while it appears that Goethe failed in his quest for defining the prima materia of color, in the next installment, we will investigate how Goethe actually did reveal the alchemy of color through his work. Excelsior!

Color is a universal phenomenon. Humans of all ages and culture revel in its appearance. Artists work with it as raw material, while scientists study it in an effort to reveal its inner workings. My own nature is artistic / sensing / feeling, and so The Alchemy of Color is being defined from that point of view.

Alchemy was the precursor to science, investigation based in natural science and personal inquiry aimed towards finding universal truths. Thus, it can be said metaphorically that alchemy can be related to the practice of making art. While artists have a wide range of approaches, their work ultimately depends on intuition and feeling and esoteric methods, a concordance with the practice of alchemy.

While some artists are quite methodical, in my experience, the scientific approach runs contrary to the act of making art. While the boundaries are not absolute, artists and scientists tend to approach a subject from opposing viewpoints.

This is a reflection of society at large, where people approach life in different ways, depending on their personalities. Artistic / sensing / feeling vs. analytic / thinking / knowing. The latter viewpoint is quietly predominant in our society today, as invisible as water is to the fish.

No matter where you fall on the personality spectrum, there is only so far one may get with the analytical perspective, and there are times when to move further, one must let go of analytics and follow the flow, to arrive at another kind of truth, that lies beyond the rational — the experiential.

The analytic / thinking / knowing personality lends itself to the scientific point of view, which aims for certainty. It is a rational position that offers the comfort of certainty, but in doing so, it closes off viewpoints that cannot be quantitatively defined. Experience is real, it is felt, but it is qualitative, and so lies beyond definition from a scientific viewpoint. Where it can be defined is: art.

Science is practical, and scientific discoveries are the foundation of technologies that have advanced society for millennia. However, the truth is that science is incomplete and imperfect, and there are many things in the universe that science cannot explain. While we tend to think of large mysteries like quantum physics, there are day to day phenomena that are elusive to science, and one of them is the experience of color.

Science has contributed so much value in the field of color. It can measure and describe the activity, but it cannot define the essence of the experience. This is uncomfortable for some people, and comforting to others. The definition of color after the fact is bound, but the experience of color remains free from the bounds of science and rational thought.

Allow me to explain: scientists can define colors, they can explain how human perception of color works, and they can define color phenomena, but where they fall short is at the boundary of color experience between multiple colors. This is the domain of the artist, who doesn’t explain, but instead just shows.

So, from my point of view, alchemists and artists are mystics, who divine their way towards revealing universal truths. And, therefore, the alchemy of color is the esoteric interaction between colors that produces an effect that goes beyond the rational, and touches something deep inside us that cannot be defined scientifically, but is only felt. This is the alchemy of color, an artistic, sensing, feeling experience of color.

Newton’s iconoclastic discovery that all colors are contained within white light was just one of a long string of scientific triumphs for the great scientist. However, he then confidently overstepped the bounds of science, into philosophy.

The colors of the spectrum are in a gradient, an unbroken transition of colors from Red to Orange to Yellow to Green to Blue to Violet. In between are some indeterminate colors that are hard to name.

This is where Newton made a small but consequential overreach; he added a seventh color, Indigo, to the named list of spectral colors. But why? The answer is that he wanted to create a correspondence of 7, which was considered a divine number, and which also matched the number of tones in the major scale in music theory.

Previously, I characterized this doctrine of correspondences as a scientific trait, but in fact, it has its roots in alchemy. Alchemy was explicitly built on the doctrine of correspondences — the belief that everything in the universe is connected through hidden sympathies and analogies. Metals correspond to planets, planets to days of the week, colors to humors, humors to elements. The entire alchemical system is a web of correspondences held together by the conviction that if two things share a structural similarity, they participate in the same underlying reality.

This is the root of Hermes Trismegistus' maxim — "As above, so below," the alchemical principle of concordance in its purest form. Newton the alchemist would have found the color-music concordance not just scientifically appealing but alchemically correct. Concluding that the spectrum has seven colors to match seven musical notes was confirmation that the universe was structured according to hidden harmonic laws, which is precisely what alchemy had always claimed. Color and music corresponding wasn't a metaphor; in the alchemical worldview it was evidence of a deeper unity. So Newton's overreach wasn't a departure from his alchemical thinking — it was an expression of it. The scientist and the alchemist were making the same move.

However, this correspondence is problematic because Indigo is not a perceptually distinct color — it's a region of the spectrum that most human eyes read as either deep blue or blue-violet. Color scientists and vision researchers have repeatedly noted that the average observer sees six bands in the spectrum, not seven.

Newton invented Indigo as a spectral color so he could add the color spectrum to the list of concordant natural phenomena, thus showing the perfection of the universe and its underlying mathematical structure. Newton bent science to fit the dominant philosophical framework of his day — Natural Theology. This is the belief that the natural world is God's creation and that scientific investigation reveals the perfection and mathematical order of divine design. Although Natural Theology was claimed by the Church, its roots are in alchemy, and the doctrine of correspondences.

This invention has reverberated through history up to the present day, where middle school science students learn the spectral colors of the rainbow by the mnemonic name ‘Roy G Biv.’

Now, as far as fudged scientific facts go, this one is pretty benign at first glance. What’s the harm in adding an extra color to the rainbow? Here’s the crux of the problem: Equating color with sound and music implies that there exists an ordered an invariable relationship of rules governing color relationships, just as what exists with sound and music theory.

The problem is that this is simply not true. Color relationships may be described by certain structures, but this does not mean that color harmony has an ordered mathematical structure.

Generations of scientists have made this mistake. And continue to do so.

To be clear, science has indeed described the physical characteristics of individual colors, and created systems that allow for the precise and consistent description and reproduction of individual colors. The problem is that even though these systems create an ordered arrangement of colors, the actual relationship between colors is not fully describable by scientific formulas.

This is a big, contentious statement that defies conventional and historic reason, but it is true, and I will show you why.

Let’s go back to the actual physical basis of color — the electromagnetic spectrum, where visible light and color exist as wavelengths of energy from approximately 380 to 700 nanometers, between infrared and ultraviolet. The spectrum is linear, and the color wavelengths can be measured scientifically.

Where color steps away from science and into theory and philosophy can be seen via another of Newton’s popular inventions — the color circle. What we now know colloquially as the ‘color wheel.’

Here is Newton’s correspondence of color and sound, linking the musical scale (Dorian mode, starting on D) with the spectral colors:

• Red = D

• Orange = E

• Yellow = F

• Green = G

• Blue = A

• Indigo = B

• Violet = C

Tellingly, Newton didn’t divide his color circle into seven equal wedges. He divided it into seven unequal arcs, sized to match the interval pattern of the Dorian scale; a whole tone got a wider arc, a semitone got a narrower one. The Dorian pattern (whole–half–whole–whole–whole–half–whole) puts its two semitones between E–F and B–C, meaning:

• Red→Orange (D→E): whole tone → wide arc

• Orange→Yellow (E→F): semitone → narrow arc

• Yellow→Green (F→G): whole tone → wide arc

• Green→Blue (G→A): whole tone → wide arc

• Blue→Indigo (A→B): whole tone → wide arc

• Indigo→Violet (B→C): semitone → narrow arc

• Violet→Red (C→D, closing the octave): whole tone → wide arc

The reason Newton used the Dorian mode in the key of D is that he needed the scale’s two natural half-steps (E–F and B–C in an all-white-key scale) to land right after orange and right after indigo — that’s what let him squeeze seven named colors into a spectrum that doesn’t actually divide into seven equal parts. Starting on D was the specific choice that made the half-steps fall where his color scheme needed them. It’s forced, not observed — a scale bent to a hue-count Newton had already decided on, not a hue-count discovered by consulting music — all in the service of showing correspondance between music and color.

Now, the reason for using a circle, rather than a linear diagram is this: musical scales repeat at the octave, the eighth note from the root. Newton judged Violet to be related to Red, and therefore arranged his color spectrum in a circle so that the last color, Violet was next to the first color, Red, in a relationship that references the repeating nature of the octave in music. Newton made this visual leap in his color circle diagram, and so the color wheel was born from this invented correspondence, and has been in popular use ever since.

In an apparent instance of synchronicity, The circle of fifths was a musical innovation around the time Newton published Opticks, having been published independently by music theorist Nickolay Diletsky in 1677 and popularized by Johann David Heinichen starting around 1711, representing the 12 major and minor keys and their relationships as fifths.

Interestingly, Heinichen didn’t invent this idea purely from tonal logic, rather, he created it while searching for a way to visually represent ideas from Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia Universalis, an hermetically influenced treatise on music, sound and universal harmony. Thus we can see yet another instance of rational discovery that was influenced by mystical means.

Newton noted that colors positioned opposite each other on his wheel showed the strongest contrast — an observation that would later be refined into the concept of complementary colors. But his own color circle, with its unevenly sized wedges bent to fit a musical scale, wasn’t built for that purpose. It would take later generations to rationalize the structure of the color circle to show this relationship.

Color circles are so ubiquitous that people take them for granted, a source of truth. However, since the spectrum is linear, Red and Violet are not adjacent in nature — there is no physical reason they should connect. Newton connected them anyway, enclosing the spectrum into a loop.

Here lies the crucial fault: The circular form implies the system is complete and settled. It looks like a diagram of facts rather than a theoretical construction. That visual authority is arguably the wheel's most misleading quality. This implication has shaped color theory ever since.

Newton’s contributions to the understanding of color were true, monumental and lasting. Nevertheless, we have inherited a number of misconceptions that resulted from his work, both by his own overreach as well as subsequent generations of misinterpretation.

The core tension was set by the scientists’ drive to formulate laws of color relationships, as well as the philosopher’s desire to ascribe structure and meaning to color, and the human desire to describe the ineffable quality of the experience of color. As we move forward, we will see this invention and tension repeat itself time and again.

Newton’s intense curiosity, immense intellect, ambition and high personal regard propelled him to great heights, but like other great men, left him susceptible to overreach. In fact, these seem to be inseparable traits, especially in the early days of science.

Since before Aristotle’s time until Newton’s, natural philosophy was the dominant form of systematic inquiry into the physical nature of the world. As the predecessor of science, natural philosophy sought to discover how nature worked, especially the underlying patterns of connections. From the animal kingdom to astrology, there was a sustained effort to describe and catalog all things, and discover the hidden concordances that govern these relationships — the search for universal harmony.

Here, we go back before Aristotle’s time to Pythagoras, the ancient Greek philosopher and polymath, who is credited for discovering many foundational mathematical and scientific principles. None of his writings exist today, but we know of his great works through Plato, Aristotle and other learned Greeks.

Amongst Pythagoras’ many great discoveries, one stands out for our purposes here — the discovery of the mathematical basis of music. According to legend, Pythagoras first recognized the mathematical basis of music when he passed a blacksmith's workshop and noticed the sound hammers of different weights produced. His observations led him to deduce the numerical ratios that produced harmonious tones.

Pythagoras extended this insight to the cosmos itself; this became the doctrine of Musica Universalis — the music of the spheres. The Pythagorean school of thought believed that mathematics was the foundation of the entire universe, and thought the whole heaven to be a musical scale and number. Music has mathematical structure, therefore mathematical structure is music, and thus everything that has mathematical structure participates in a universal harmony.

Sound is vibration, a rapid movement on an audible wavelength that creates sound waves. When multiple sounds are produced, their waves interact, producing either a harmonious or consonant sound, which is pleasing to the ear, or a dissonant sound, which is disagreeable.

When two sound waves interact, their frequencies either align or conflict. Consonant intervals have simple frequency ratios, which means their waves align regularly and reinforce each other. The result is a smooth, periodic waveform that the auditory system processes cleanly.

Dissonant sound intervals have complex, irrational ratios. When two frequencies are close enough to stimulate overlapping regions of the inner ear, they create neural competition, or beating, that the brain experiences as tension or unease. Thus, certain sound combinations are physically uncomfortable.

From here, the judgement point shifts from scientific to aesthetic. Sound has a particular effect on human hearing, where certain sound combinations can be physically upsetting. This is the pure effect of sound. Music is built on top of this relationship — the aesthetic combination of sounds into consonant relationships and pleasing sequences.

Simple ratios, such as 2:1, 3:2, produce consonance, harmony, and pleasure. The irrational ratio √2:1 physically produces dissonance, unease in the listener’s ear. Mathematics and aesthetic experience seemed to be the same thing. That’s an extraordinary claim, and it appears here to be demonstrably true.

Unlike pure sound, music is subject to taste and cultural differences. In medieval times, The Devil’s Music was what the Church called the tritone, three whole tones and six semitones. The tritone intervals are not simple ratios, but an irrational number. If God’s order was expressed mathematically, then this tritone combination was heretical due to its imperfection.

The discovery of the mathematical relationships of sound and consonance / dissonance supported the growth of music as an aesthetic art form. Music can be described mathematically, but math alone cannot make music. Sound and music are also unique in that their physical effect on people are demonstrable, yet fluid. There are sound combinations that are physically painful, while other combinations, especially in music, are heard culturally. The devil’s tritone, for example, is the basis of blues music and its flattened fifth. The ear that hears this as dissonant is culturally trained.

Music then, brings together three unique aspects — psychoacoustics, harmonic theory, and Musica Universalis. The first two are demonstrably scientific, while the third is philosophical, a world view that is created and overlaid on scientific principles, in order to present a cohesive philosophical framework that contains an agenda. Musica universalis was a philosophical-cosmological tradition that united scientists, philosophers and theologians.

This is a key example of the thread that connects a long line of Western intellectual tradition, characterized by the need to make fundamental statements about the organized principles of the physical world, from Pythagoras to Newton and beyond. It is found in the practice of natural philosophy and science, as well as esoteric hermetic traditions, where it is described by Hermes Trismegistus’ maxim: ‘As above, so below.’ Of course, this principle was later assimilated into the Church by Aquinas, as evidence of God’s infallible handiwork.

Going back to Newton, his work, like many scientists, was aimed at finding the hidden physical rules of the universe, and incorporating them into a cohesive framework of meaning. The Principia offers a prime example — Newton's laws of motion and gravity unified terrestrial and celestial mechanics into a single mathematical framework. That was legitimate and correct. However, Newton then spent years trying to extend that framework further, into chemistry, alchemy, and theology, looking for the same kind of unified law operating at every level of nature.

This was where he found himself with color; After his scientifically rigorous demonstration of the nature of light and color, he overextended himself with sweeping proposals about the nature of matter, force, God, the ether, sensation, and the relationship between light and everything else.

It was at this point that Newton’s desire to find universal concordance led future generations astray about the relationships between colors, that continue to reverberate to this day. Our next installment will reveal Newton’s oversteps and examine why they still matter.

"For the rays, to speak properly, are not colored. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this or that color."
— Sir Isaac Newton


The perception of color is innate to the human experience, as it is tied to our evolutionary existence. This natural integration has fed the human desire to capture color and create with it. The earliest cave pictographs in Lascaux, France were done with color. And so, every culture since the beginning of humankind has incorporated color into the fabric of its society, with ever more sophisticated techniques and technologies.

To understand where we are now, in the 21st century, we must travel back in time, to find the threads of color thought that connect us to the past. This is the way to reveal the untold truths, the assumptions and the oversteps that have influenced and biased the ways we use color today — the way to finding everything you don’t know about color.

The true origin of colors was obscured for centuries. From antiquity, the origins of color were described largely from observation, reasoning and argument, as part of a larger framework of natural philosophy. The most important early figure was Aristotle, who held that all colors were derived from Black and White, defining this framework in his seminal work, de Coloribus, or On Colors.

As a natural philosopher, Aristotle based his work on his observation of nature and deductive arguments based on philosophical notions, in what seemed to be common sense; water and air are naturally white, while gold is the color of fire. Light itself doesn’t have color, but all colors are visible because of it. Red is a mixture of light and black, and colors are created by varying mixtures of light and black. Color in living things is determined by the effect of moisture and dryness in combination with light and black.

Aristotle’s color theories solidified into canonical knowledge, so ingrained that they were absorbed whole into Scholasticism, the dominant mode of medieval philosophy. Thomas Aquinas united Aristotelian philosophy with Christian doctrine during this time, building the intellectual foundation and official position of the Christian Church. This position held for over four hundred years, until the time of Isaac Newton.

Isaac Newton was a giant of intellect, a polymath and original thinker who’s discoveries changed the course of history, as a physicist, mathematician, astronomer, inventor, thinker — and alchemist. He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution that led to the Enlightenment; amongst his protean discoveries, he formulated the laws of motion and gravity, calculus, and foundational principles of optics. His observation of first principles combined with ingenious thinking overturned years of conventional wisdom and official dogma during his lifetime.

In 1666, the Black Plague was rampant, forcing Newton to seclude himself in his home laboratory while Cambridge was shut down. Working on his theories of optics, Newton began experimenting with prisms.

Prisms are familiar to everyone, casting the familiar rainbow gradient, and they were a well known curiosity during Newton’s day. However, the difference was that Newton thought differently, and his investigation was in an entirely different direction than the conventional wisdom that prisms merely modified or corrupted white light to produce colors.

Newton’s original proposition was the opposite — that white light was a composite of all colors, which the prism separated into bands. Crucially, Newton designed a set of experiments to prove his ideas; using two prisms, he was able to separate the spectral colors and then recombine them back into white light. Thus, Newton was able to prove that the prism did not, in fact, alter the color of the white light, because this recombination would not be possible if the first prism was modifying the original color. The conclusion being that colors were actually different refractions, or wavelengths, of light!

Here, we must pause and consider Newton, the man. Well known historically as the father of modern Science, he was also an avid Christian, and behind the scenes, he was a practicing alchemist. Over half of what Newton wrote concerned theology and alchemy. Newton devoted at least thirty years of his life to its intensive study, an estimated one million words devoted to alchemy, and most of it has never been printed.

Alchemy was the predecessor of Science, and influenced by natural philosophy and esoteric beliefs and rituals. Specifically, modern chemistry sprang from alchemy and its experiments with physically transforming substances and elements in rigorous and elaborate processes.

The modern view of alchemy tends to focus on the vain search for transmuting base substances into gold, and obscure practices that were part witchcraft. Newton himself used alchemy as another way to access and unlock the secrets of the universe.

Why was this secret? To start, knowledge was seen as dangerous, to be entrusted only to a select few adepts who had proven themselves to be capable of understanding and wielding this secret knowledge, while protecting it from being corrupted or dispersed into unworthy hands. Another reason why knowledge was dangerous was when it conflicted with authority, undermining official standards and positions.

As a seeker of truth, Newton was unafraid and prolific, yet cautious in public life. Privately, he rejected commonly held dogma and the established views of the Church. Newton’s heresies were numerous and could have cost him his positions at Cambridge and the Royal Society, so he kept this work hidden — another hallmark of alchemy.

Early scientists and free thinkers all ran the risk of running afoul of the Church, who’s position of authority in medieval times was absolute. As God’s representatives, their position was absolute and unquestionable, according to the doctrine of infallibility. Therefore, to question any of the intellectual framework of the Church, as defined by Aquinas and others, was to run afoul of God, and therefore be open to punishment.

This could take many forms. The story of Copernicus, Bruno and Galileo followed this arc, when Copernicus’ astronomical discovery that the sun is at the center of our solar system challenged the Church’s dogma that the Earth is at the center of the universe. The Church’s reaction was to ban Copernicus’ book, burn Bruno at the stake, and imprison Galileo. This was the regime of authority under which Newton worked secretly in his quest for knowledge — illicit or not.

There was another authority that both supported and suppressed Newton’s quest — The Royal Society. Founded in 1660, to promote and support scientific inquiry, it quickly gained patronage from Charles II and thus the support of the monarchy. Composed of the leading scientific minds from various disciplines, The Royal Society became a competitive proving ground for science, the debate of ideas and the weighing of evidence.

Robert Hooke was Newton's senior at the Royal Society and one of the most formidable scientific minds of the era. He was another polymath who made significant contributions to biology, physics, architecture and engineering. His strongly held views came into conflict with Newton’s in a fundamental way, about the nature of light; Newton held that light was composed of particles, while Hooke maintained that it was a wave.

Hooke refused to fully accept Newton’s theories because he declared that his own model could account for the same light splitting phenomenon. Ultimately, both were right, however, this wasn't resolved until the discovery of quantum mechanics in the 20th century. The dispute was never fully resolved in their lifetimes, but the conflict meant that publication was delayed for years while it played out.

So, from Newton’s first discovery in 1666, and his first submission to The Royal Society in 1672, his paper wasn’t published until 1704. Backed by the authority of the monarchy and the institutional prestige of The Royal Society, and presented as a scientific discovery instead of a theological argument, Newton’s discovery finally laid to rest the archaic conventional wisdom around the nature of color. This marked the end of the first epoch of color, but by no means did it end the debate around color.

Newton’s prodigious intellect enabled his discoveries, but it also led him astray in theorizing about color. In the next installment, we will examine where Newton overreached — and find the errors that persist to this day.

Once there was a special moment that awakened my mind’s eye; a random encounter with Monet ended up changing everything for me — blues and greens playing with each other over a dark background, no figures, just brushstrokes of color, forming a luminous dreamworld with great depth — leading me into a lifelong pursuit of that experience of wonder.

Today, I’m a Human Machine Interface and User Experience designer with over 25 years of design experience and fine arts practice. I’m an educator, explorer and autodidact — and a left handed Scorpio — who sees the world differently.

During my MFA studies at Parsons School of Design in New York, I was frustrated with traditional color theory and tools, and I wanted to find a better, more intuitive way to work with color on the computer; I desired to create a more fluid way for digital artists to work with color and develop methods closer to the way painters work with color. I found it, and used it to create Colormxr and Interactive Color Creation — the methods of RGB+CMY colormixing.

The Alchemy of Color is an investigation into the mysteries of color, following red threads through history across the parallel worlds of art, science and human perception, and the tools, practices and traditions we’ve inherited from each. The first arc, Everything You Don’t Know About Color, explores where conventional wisdom about color has impacted color usage in art + design, shining a light in the darkness to help people discover how to create confidently with color.

Historically, alchemists acquired knowledge as a means of transformation. The aim of the Alchemy of Color is the same, to pursue the hidden power of color, so that we may watch it shine. Excelsior!

“With color one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft.”
—Henri Matisse

Color is a universal phenomena, permeating our very existence; color is deeply embedded in the human experience at every level, from daily life to extraordinary events. In its everyday role, color performs myriad utilitarian functions. We use color in many ways, to tell us if the stove is still hot, or when to stop or go at the traffic light.

However, there are also moments when color transcends its boundaries and asserts its remarkable power. These moments reveal the mysterious beauty of color, touching something that is deep inside us all. That moment of transcendence reveals the alchemy of color.

Humans respond to the power of color naturally, and have endeavored throughout history to harness this power and employ it in their own products, designs and artworks. To do this requires two things: color substances and color application — the art of working with color.

Color substances are the physical color means that artists and designers work with. From early natural resources such as charcoal, berries and ochre, man learned to create dyes and pigments through increasingly sophisticated methods. This early chemistry was a form of alchemy that eventually morphed into scientific practice. Today, digital artists and designers work with the substance of light, Red, Green and Blue photons.

The third act of alchemy, and the most elusive, is the act of creating with color, using it expressively to dazzle the mind's eye and invoke the power of color. This is the alchemy of art.

Historically, Alchemists have played a mysterious but important role, part mystic and part scientist, exploring the mysteries of existence with esoteric and unorthodox methods. In alchemy, the Magnum Opus, or ‘great work’ is the process of taking ordinary matter and converting it to gold. Here, the Alchemy of Color takes color as its subject matter, in a quest to understand the mysterious nature of color.

What is the alchemy of color? It is not a material thing, but rather it is philosophical gold, the knowledge of how to work with color to transform it from dross to gold, seeking the moments when color asserts its transcendent power, revealing the mysterious beauty of color, touching something that is deep inside all of us.

Experiencing color is easy, but working with it creatively is another matter entirely. Color and form are the two main components of any visual composition, and so every artist and designer is forced to address color and how to apply it to their work. That this happens from the very beginning, when a child is handed a box of crayons, belies the hidden complexity of color choice; It is assumed that this is a natural talent, a gift that some lucky few may have, while the rest of us look at a row of green crayons and grab one randomly and hope for the best.

Later on, we are introduced to color wheels, color palettes and color theory, all very authoritative, yet inscrutable. This extends to software tools, such as slider controls, color pickers and palette generators. There appears to be a logic that somehow remains elusive during the creative process, compelling practitioners to fill in the gaps with their own taste and ingenuity. Thus, we arrive at an age old maxim that seems as relevant now as it was when it was first spoken in the 19th century:

"Designers may be made, but colorists are born."
— Eugene Delacroix

This is where I found myself many years ago, a young digital designer who wanted to learn how to work with color. I found a Red Yellow Blue color wheel at my local art supply store, at first convinced by its appearance, only to be frustrated by the lack of results, and finding out later that it was the wrong tool entirely.

I did find one heroic color resource, Josef Albers and his book Interaction of Color. Unlike other color theorists, Albers emphasized personal experience and perception as a means of working with color. Albers’ inspiration led me on a journey through time between the distinct disciplines of color, the parallel traditions of art and science, and human experience of color in its many forms. This journey has led me to confront tradition and develop tools and methods that shatter many dogmatic and didactic assertions about color.

This is the basis for the first arc, Everything You Don't Know About Color, where I dispel common myths and beliefs about color. Specifically, from a practical artist's and designer's perspective of working with color. It turns out that much of the confusion around working with color is due to these myths and half truths we've inherited, and successful colorists today are still defined by Delacroix's observation. I hope to change that, and the first step is to examine the historical record and call out some key points that, while they may not be wrong, are hindering the creative process of working with color.

This is iconoclastic work; subverting the conventional wisdom and dominant paradigms that make up popular color knowledge. Only by doing this can the alchemy of color be revealed and unbound, a journey of transformational knowledge.

Onward!