When I taught in a first grade class group a couple of years ago I overheard a conversation between two boys, good friends, as they were playing the game “Connect Four.” As you probably know, “Connect Four” is a variant of Tic-Tac-Toe played with black and red checker pieces, the object being to “connect four” of your pieces before your opponent. The boy who was playing with the black pieces had had a long, hard day and seemed quite depressed. His friend, playing with red pieces, paused in the middle of their game to ask, “Are you blue?” Of course he was expressing concern for the emotional state of his friend. His friend, however, looked puzzled and angrily replied, “No! I’m black!” thinking that his playmate had become inexplicably confused about the color of the game pieces they were using; he was intent on forging ahead and winning the game. His concerned friend explained, “No, blue can mean sad. Or down. Are you feeling sad?” Still, this thoughtful query was brushed aside: “I’m fine. Let’s play.” Now both the boys seemed rather sad.

            The connection between color and emotion is fascinating—and fraught. As

 we can see in the case of these two boys color is often the best vocabulary we have to describe emotion since it speaks to a level of experiencing that language struggles to capture. But because everyone’s experience, everyone’s relationship with emotion and sensation, is different it is often the case that meaning expressed this way falls, so to speak, on “deaf ears.” Attempts to connect by speaking to emotion through color may fail, as in the instance of “Connect Four.”  But that little story also speaks to larger questions about the way people perceive the use or value of sensory and emotional experience; all too often it is brushed aside for the sake of “winning the game,” of achieving a clear form but failing to respect the power of the feelings at play and one’s relationship to them.

In these two boys’ interaction I see the tension between form and color Arnheim described as the difference between a romanticist and a classicist. He writes, “Emotion strikes us as color does. Shape, by contrast, seems to require a more active response” (Arnheim 336). He goes on to emphasize the long artistic and philosophical tradition that privileges form over color (336-7). I’m curious about the notion of emotion as a passive experience. Doesn’t emotion require an active response as well? Wasn’t it a feeling of intense despair brought on by the loss of color in his world that compelled Jonathan I to actively seek out the response of Dr. Sacks? More to the point, the gray world that Jonathan I found himself trapped in made it extremely difficult for him to take effective and fulfilling action. In a similar sense, color (momentarily) drained from the world of those two little first grade boys when one proved unwilling to acknowledge the place of emotion in their interaction.

Clearly color’s connection to emotion and expression make it a topic of heated debate, but why must the result of the debate be to compose a sort of hierarchy? I was certainly disturbed by the statement of Charles Blanc cited by Arnheim: “the union of design and color is necessary to beget painting just as is the union of man and woman to beget mankind, be design must maintain its preponderance over color. Otherwise painting speeds to its ruin: it will fall through color just as mankind fell through Eve” (qtd. in Arnheim 337).  This seems an unnecessary and unfair distinction to say the least.

            Just as Einstein came to prove that the particle nature of light need not be an idea lost to the past, just as the value of Goethe considerations of color took time to find their moment, so too ways of seeing which seem somehow unsophisticated or somehow unlikely may serve a useful function within a larger whole. Heinz Werner, the theorist whose interpretation of the experiment that asked children to chose between color and form Arnheim cites in his chapter (335), also emphasized the need to respect the emotional and sensory level of our experience. Accessing unwieldy emotion may illuminate elements of experience that transform our “organizing” intellect and create a path for insight. Emotion certainly does make life colorful and urges us to strive to appreciate its wholeness, its interconnectedness, its relationships. An appreciation for color also reminds us of creative difference.

The unanswerable question of whether we experience color in the same way alerts us to be sensitive, curious, and respectful of the differences in our experience. As Arnheim writes,   “No one will ever be sure that his neighbor sees a particular color exactly the same way he himself does” (Arnheim 330). Color itself can remind us of the infinite vastness and variety of experience. Rather than diminishing this question by chalking it up to being the simple state of affairs, it seems possible to look to this as grounds for creative discourse and acts of caring. Remembering that, as Livingstone writes, “your experience of red differs from mine simply on the basis of knowing that our life experiences have been different, ” might prevent us from making damaging and unfair assumptions—might prevent us from creating restrictive hierarchies (Livingstone 33).  We might be thoughtful enough to ask, “Are you blue?” or to acknowledge to such concern with a creative, colorful appreciation.