On Colour
Why are we drawn to some things before we even know why?
A friend came over recently and stopped when she saw one of the arrangements I had been working on.
It was red and pink.
Not pale pink and burgundy. Not the sort of combination that quietly blends into the background.
Bright red Cymbidium Orchids against playful pink Cherry Blossoms.
She looked at it for a moment and said,
"I'm drawn to it."
A few days later, someone else said almost exactly the same thing. Then another.
Three different people, without prompting, had reacted to the same combination in almost the same way. That stayed with me.
Because what does it actually mean to be drawn to a colour?
We talk about colour as though it has a dictionary. Red means passion. Blue means calm. Green means renewal. Pink means softness. But the more I looked into it, the less convinced I became that colour works quite so neatly.
Colour doesn't seem to speak to us in a fixed language. It speaks in context.
This is something the artist Josef Albers explored for years in his teaching and writing. In Interaction of Color, he demonstrated that a colour can appear completely different depending on the colours surrounding it.
The colour itself hasn't changed. Our perception of it has.
That idea made me look at my arrangements differently. Perhaps the appeal of the red and pink wasn't really red or pink at all. Perhaps it was the relationship between them.
Red is visually forceful. It commands attention. Pink sits somewhere alongside it with an entirely different character. Put them together and neither behaves quite as expected.
The red becomes more dramatic. The pink becomes more vivid. The contrast creates tension. And tension is interesting.
We are often attracted to things that contain a little contradiction. Sweet and bitter. Old and new. Soft and structured.Light and dark. Perhaps colour works in much the same way.
There is also something else I found interesting.
Research into colour and emotion suggests that our responses aren't universal. They can be influenced by context, culture, personal experience and even the object that carries the colour.
The same red can feel romantic on a rose, urgent on a road sign, celebratory on a dress and alarming in another setting. The colour hasn't changed. The meaning has.
That seems obvious once you say it. Yet we often design as though colour exists in isolation.
We choose a colour we like and assume everyone else will experience it in the same way. They won't.
And perhaps that is part of what makes choosing a gift so difficult. You aren't simply choosing something beautiful. You're choosing something that will be seen by another person. Someone with their own memories. Their own associations. Their own sense of beauty. Their own history with colour.
A particular shade of yellow might remind one person of summer holidays and another of their childhood bedroom. A certain blue might feel peaceful to one person and melancholy to another. A red rose might mean romance. Or courage. Or a grandmother's garden. Or simply, that's my favourite colour.
There is no universal translation. And I think that makes colour far more interesting than the usual lists of "what each colour means."
It means we don't have to design by formula. We can design by feeling.
That red and pink arrangement taught me something I hadn't quite understood before. Sometimes the most compelling combinations aren't harmonious in the traditional sense. They have a little friction.
They ask the eye to move between them. They create a reaction before the mind has had time to explain it.
Maybe that is what my friend meant when she said, "I'm drawn to it."
She wasn't necessarily able to explain why. She didn't need to. Her eyes had already decided.
And perhaps that is one of the quiet pleasures of beautiful things.
We don't always have to understand why we love them.
Sometimes we can simply notice what makes us stop.
From the Cellar Table
For those who believe giving is an art.
Written by Sara
Founder, Stem & Cellar
