The Mystery of Colors

Serhat
3 min readApr 23, 2021

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Color is one of the essential building blocks for creating works of art, along with line, texture, shame, and a few other elements. Color can change the mood of picture depending on the way it is used, draw the viewer’s eye to certain portion of the whole picture. The step an artist takes to paint canvas may appear random, or simple but the stage of choosing a color is quite purposeful, almost as a science.

The mystery behind the colors which are very meaningful is an enigma in the world of science. The enigma is about how colors can stimulate our emotions, or change our moods. Many artists use colors as a deep and strong communication tool.

As some examples, the red color may stimulate the feeling of appetite, along with other emotions and might stirs up some feelings such as love and lust. The black color may spurs up seriousness, coldness or coolness and other colors specifically may stir up different emotions and moods of viewer too.

Colors have obviously some impact on our brains, and scientists know that there is evolutional purpose while a color stimulates emotions and feelings. Also, we know that the association between our feelings and colors are engraved in us over time, for example when we think of black color, we tend to think about malignancy, maybe brutality or something else but no matter whatever it is, we are also taught to establish the connection between them.

However, could you tell what a color really is? Or Why there are colors? What are they meant for? All of these questions are not fully discovered yet. In the whole picture of science, there is gap we could not fully paint named the science of color.

Thus, while we are holding the brush (which is metaphorically the methods of science) and trying to create whole picture of science by looking at all mysteries ( metaphorically the objects we look at and paint), there is another point that the artist(which is metaphorically scientists) cannot understand and ask himself/herself: why plants are not black?

This is the most fundamental reason of why scientists cannot bring the mystery of colors to light, there is a little understanding about colors in comparison to other fields in science.

Some people say that Chlorophyll pigment in the leaves makes plants green because chlorophyll is green. However, why some butterflies are blue, and they do not have any blue pigment. We see colors because of the reflection of lights. As we all know, the wavelengths of light that we can see start from purple and are sorted into the colors of the rainbow as navy blue, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. Of course, there are more than seven colors, everything we perceive with our eyes swallow some wavelengths of light and reflects others. The reflections they make is what we call a color. We know why we see butterflies in blue when we examine them under a microscope. We see very small protrusions on the wings of the butterfly. When we take a closer look at these, we see structures that look like pine trees. The sunlight that hits these structures is reflected in its layers. But most of the wavelengths are trapped inside this structure. Except blue. We see the butterfly as blue because it is the only wavelength that can be reflected from this perforated, layered structure.

As we understood what the artist painted so far on the canvas, let’s take a look at what the artist tries to address with hand gestures and movements, it seems like an possibility of a new innovation. let’s see what possibility the artist tries to point out.

If we could figure out what kind of light spectrums that other stars have, we might have an understanding of the appearance of photosynthetic life that exists in the other exoplanets revolving around the stars. For now, this is just an little possibility, just hypothetical, this is why the artist does not paint it on the canvas, and point out to this possibility with his/her hands, even the artist wants to paint it.

When the artist finish the whole picture, and exhibits his/her picture in a museum, we humans that roams in the museum would see what kind of life is there in the other planet without landing them.

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