Responding to Colour

Responding to Colour

Human responses to colour are numerous and very complex, and though only a minority of them are directly relevant to art education, as teachers we need to have a wider awareness of their cultural and psychological significance. As in most areas of the curriculum, children think and communicate most readily about colour as they experience it: the red of this paint, the green of that leaf, the blue of the sky. They may, as many adults do, find it difficult or impossible to remember colours accurately or to think about colour in the abstract, dissociated from particular objects, yet like everyone else they respond to colours intuitively and often very strongly. In trying to become aware of children's responses to ...