What is the alchemy of color?
Going beyond the rational and the scientific perspective
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.
