Motivation for a new approach to teaching colour
Colour surrounds us. It is a visual language that affects how we feel and how we interact with the world around us. It helps us communicate and engage with our surroundings. Although colour is ubiquitous, and plays a critical role in the way we understand and shape the world, much of what most people know about colour is outdated, over-simplified, and full of misconceptions.
The seeds for the Colour Literacy Project began at the Munsell Centennial Color Symposium held in Boston, 2018, where many people voiced their concerns over the current state of colour education. Colour is playing an ever-diminishing role in art and design education worldwide. Much of colour education still revolves around curricula developed in the 1960s or earlier, which has been over-simplified, removed from its context and transformed into a reductive (and somewhat stale) theoretical framework of knowledge. It has unfortunately been reduced to snippets of colour ‘facts’. What has been lost is a colour education which fosters a desire to investigate and explore colour, in all its complexity and nuance (and messiness). This over-simplification of colour knowledge has also contributed to many misconceptions about colour, widespread amongst artists and designers, as well as the general public. What is very often taught and published today as "foundational colour knowledge" generally rests on: 1) How red, blue and yellow- coloured paints mix; and 2) The misconception that there are only seven colours in the spectrum or rainbow. Colour is so much more.
The Colour Literacy Project presents a new way to teach colour. Rather than starting with the ubiquitous mixing of the three (so-called) ‘primaries’, red, blue and yellow, we start learning about colour by seeing.
Look around and notice the colours around you. If you are inside, look at your wall. It is probably painted a solid colour, but how many variations of that colour do you see? How do shadows change what you see? How does your distance from the wall change the colour you see? Is the colour the same when the sun is shining brightly outside and when it is dark at night and you illuminate your walls with LED lights? What about that tree outside in the summer– many of its leaves may appear green, but how many variations of green do you see? How can you describe those variations? If you look at the same tree in an hour or two, are the greens the same? This is where we start: by noticing, by describing and by recognizing that the colours we see very much depend on their context. These ideas are foundational, yet are often missed within a traditional colour education.
The primary objective for the Colour Literacy Project is to develop foundational study material for teachers of all educational levels, as well as the general public, with a “top-down/bottom-up” approach, simultaneously addressing colour education upwards from preschool, and downwards from post-secondary levels. We recognize the need for a multi-disciplinary, overarching framework that connects colour with all sorts of curricula – science, history, math, geography, language, dance. Colour is not just for artists. With the daily inundation of colourful images, videos and advertisements, we are now historically at an opportune moment where digital technology has exploded and become an integral element of our culture. Colour literacy, which combines science literacy with visual literacy, is now paramount to navigate in a world in which colour is so accessible.
