Colour and Mind/Static and Dynamic, 2006
Richard Attenborough Centre
The Colour and Mind Project Two years ago, I started to think a little bit further than I used to about colour and colour perception. This was due to my reading about colour in science and especially about the ‘visual brain’. I had come across an idea which set off this project. It was based on a natural phenomenon which people recognized many centuries ago but for which they could not find a reasonable explanation until the 20
th Century. In summary, light/colour changes every fraction of a second. (This flux is what I mean by ‘dynamic’ in the title of the present exhibition.) However, the mind registers only a general, static view of colour. (This is what I refer to by ‘static’ in my title.) The scientific explanation for this is that our mind describes what is most important for it and discards unnecessary detail. Also, the mind cannot keep up with the constant fluctuations in the information it receives – the analysis takes longer than the changes in the external world.
I started to look carefully and more closely than before at this phenomenon and its description in scientific literature and began to produce work with a specific form and with a very fast movement of the brush, and many different colours and nuances, to reflect the speed of colour changes in nature and to force my brain to perceive more quickly. At the moment I can not say that I have achieved what I would like to achieve. What I have done during these last two years, however, is based on these experiments with my mind and colour.
My first exhibition within this project, Colour and Mind, was a little over a year ago at Nottingham Castle Museum. Some of this previous work is presented here again plus the new work created in 2005, to give a feeling of the whole process from the beginning until the present.
