In art, basic colour theory arranges colours on a wheel. The three primaries (red, blue, yellow) anchor it, and the secondary colours are mixed from 2 of the 3 primaries, creating violet (red+blue), green (blue+yellow) and orange (yellow+red).  You can go one step further and create tertiaries (blue-green, red-orange) to flesh out and nuance the colour wheel.

With me so far?

Colours that are side by side on the wheel (red, red-orange and orange, for example) are considered analogous, or similar. Makes sense.

Colours that are across from one another on the wheel (blue and orange, yellow and violet, red and green) are complementary. Juxtapose them for lovely contrasts. Mix them together and they neutralize each other, creating brown or black.

So where are we going here?

van Gogh stated : “There are colours which cause each other to shine brilliantly, which form a couple which complete each other like man and woman.”

Colours do not exist in a vacuum. They are part of a spectrum, and they act in harmony, in contrast or in fusion with others, as a form of expression and perception. They are all relative to one another.

Some colours are considered warm, and others are considered cool. This is where it gets interesting. The colour ‘’wheel’’ is in fact an artificial construct, a ‘’rolling up’’ if you will of the (linear) colour spectrum, in which the two ends (red at the far left and violet at the far right) are forced to meet and become contiguous. Red is supposed to be the warmest end of the spectrum, and violet the coolest. But how to account for that opposition on a circular wheel that puts the two side-by-side? For this reason, there is not a whole lot of consensus or clarity when it comes to specifically defining ‘’warm’’ and ‘’cool’’ colours. Blues with a lot of red in them can be warm. Yellows veering to green can be cool. And once you get beyond the primaries and secondaries, all hell breaks loose in terms of categorization. It’s an imperfect system, but perhaps therein lies the real beauty. It becomes subjective fluid. It’s not infallible. Somewhat ironically, it’s ‘human’.

After that little treatise on colour theory, I’m finally getting to the point I wanted to make. We as humans have a propensity to organize, systematize and categorize everything. Whether we do it consciously or unconsciously. We define people and things by what they are not, by their very Otherness, so to speak. Furthermore, we have imposed an inordinate number of layered frameworks on which to base our categorizations: age, race, sex, religion, nationality, political affiliation, social stratum, sexual orientation, education level, type of (or lack of) employment, ‘privilege’, and yes colour too, plus umpteen other affiliations or characteristics. We use these frameworks to define ourselves as much as to define others. And we seem to mostly gravitate to those who share similar frameworks, while we feel a disconnect, a fear, even a hatred of those with whom we share little. We seem to forget that, like colours, we are all fundamentally and necessarily part of a spectrum, and who we are is relative to everybody else, be they analogous or complementary.

It just seems that these days we have arrived at such a level of narcissism and entrenched-ness, seeing the world solely through whatever-tinted glasses we each choose to wear, that we’re headed toward a very monochromatic world.

I'm not going to be prescriptive here. That's part of the problem.

I'm simply asking you to open your mind and think.