Color, Emotion and Videotape

Love Can't Hide by Lil McGill

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have been going through a phase of exploring emotional awareness, and just how powerfully we are ruled by our feeling life whether we are aware of it or not.  These emotional patterns are laid down in the earliest beginnings of childhood (and likely before) and thus are pre-verbal and often very difficult to name and describe.  However, it is becoming more and more clear to me that when we are able to acknowledge our feeling state in a pretty specific way, we are able to navigate life’s challenges with  a lot more grace, fluidity and, shall I say it, power.

Enter painting.  The kind of painting we do here in our Abstract Laboratory workshop is dominated by our feeling life.  I had to chuckle when I heard that an art show juror told an abstract artist that “abstract artists are so busy expressing their feelings all the time.”  I would have to say that all art is expressing emotion of some kind, that we want art to elicit an emotional response, rather than mental, whether it is highly detailed and realistic in style, or monotone pure abstract.  It is almost as if many people fear the abstract expression, because it is so naked in its transmission of emotional energy.  This I can understand, and yet obviously, I am drawn deep into the abstract world because it is where I find the most beauty, freedom and truth.

In her brilliant book,”The Language of Emotions,” (previously published in the form of the book, “Emotional Genius”), Karla McLaren writes about  the utter importance of acknowledging and honoring all of our emotions, particularly those thought to be difficult.  I have been under the impression all of my life that there are positive emotions and negative emotions, and that half of all emotions are “positive” cheerful, joyous, happy, etc. and the other half are on the darker side, anger, fear, grief, shame, sadness, depression, envy, etc.  Of course there are many ways of looking at all of this, but what I got from McLaren’s work is that the “Happy” emotions are about 1/7 of the spectrum of basic emotional expression.   A friend told me that that is one of the bases of Buddhism. Happiness is just another emotion, and that our American way of chasing after happiness at the expense of listening to what our other emotions are telling us is really getting us into a lot of trouble. So in this light I thought it would be interesting to do a series of paintings depicting a full range of emotions, honoring each one for its beauty and important message held within its particular structure.  I thought I would call the series “52 feelings” and have a new painting for each week of the year, looking at a different emotional flavor in its own separate painting.

Enter color.  My intellect would just love to assign a different color to each emotional state.  That would really tie things up nicely into a bright colored, full spectrum package.  I was able to do this for another series I am beginning to paint, based on astrology.  I have been able to assign my own system of colors to the planets and zodiac signs based on the elements, so that I can explore painting astrological charts in an abstract form. But the emotional spectrum is more difficult to color in. I’ve seen emotional color wheels, I’ve studied the chakra system, I’ve noted that over the internet you can find color associations for different feelings and they are all different.  Which causes me great dismay.  No one agrees!  No one agrees?  When I was young, in my mind’s eye, each day of the week was a different color.  Monday was yellow, and Tuesday was turquoise, and Wednesday was green, and Thursday was brown and orange and Friday was purple, Saturday was multi-colored and Sunday was white.  Everyone I asked had different colors for their days of the week. I really thought all Wednesdays were green. McLaren says that it is really too difficult to assign color associations to feelings.  Because color responses are so subjective.  Everyone has a different color association for different feelings coming from their own intricate experience.  I thought that maybe there was some reliable, archetypal color system – a universal human understanding, but I have yet to find it.

Enter videotape.  Okay, well not videotape exactly, because all the video is digital these days, or so I’m discovering.  Last October our Abstract Laboratory painting class was filmed for the local tv station.  The subject was color, and we all ended up talking a great deal about emotion and our feelings associated with different colors and of course, different colors meant different things to each artist.  In the video I give the example of magenta (one of my favorites).  Magenta, is in the red family, and traditionally could be associated with the first chakra, which is survival, primal fear, instinct, groundedness, danger, passion.  But to me magenta is also joy and expansion, it has an endless uplifting energy.  The color magenta was actually named after the Battle of Magenta, in France, when a brand new color of dye looked like the color of blood from the battlefield and thus was all the rage in Paris.   That has a whole other connotation and I would bet that every color has its own complex and contradictory history of meaning and connections, both dark and light.  I have recently thought that the reason I love magenta so much, and “can’t live without it” as I often say, is that my mother had a cardigan sweater that color when I was four.  Now that’s a personal association of the most powerful nature.

So here’s the question.  Can you paint sadness?  We will be experimenting with this in one way or another in the coming year.  Can you paint love?  Can you infuse your painting work intentionally with a feeling state that could be of benefit to others?  Can your thought-forms infiltrate the water in your painting and manifest in form and color to create a space of healing?

I’m not sure how these experiments will manifest.  There may or may not be a series of paintings coming out of it.  I have a feeling it will have something to do with videotape.  I mean digital video. I feel my creative life restructuring itself, changing media, becoming much more collaborative.  Have you noticed how dramatically and quickly our lives are changing?  It’s all so mysterious, and we have so much to learn, and thus, the work of the abstract painting laboratory goes on.

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