Night is the Color of Blood

Color is the most pervasive and prominent feature of our visual environments. Our minds and emotions often respond to it unconsciously, and we make many choices daily based on the appeal or distaste that color communicates to us: buying clothes, choosing fruits in the market, deciding which path to take while on a walk in the park. In recent years, color has taken on a special emphasis in advertising and home-improvement media. It has become a billion-dollar industry, especially in the trend-dependent worlds of fashion, interior design, and home/garden improvement. There’s no denying color’s considerable impact on our lives, or its ability to deeply affect our emotions and psyches. We even use it in language to describe our moods: in the pink, seeing red, or feeling blue.

Nature is the primary source of all color, and humans, being far more visually oriented creatures than, say, dogs (who have limited color vision but finely tuned senses of smell and hearing), are extremely sensitive to color. We have to be: earlier in our evolution, we relied on color to determine whether food was ripe or spoiled, to detect illness, to recognize poisonous or useful plants, to interpret weather. Though our interactions with the natural world may be lessened these days, our deeply complex interaction with color continues. Our emotional responses to different colors can be so complex and subtle that we’re often unaware of it. But we only need to become aware of those responses to appreciate color’s effect on our lives.

Our eyes  …