Traveling to Germany and not knowing German, I wondered how easy it would be to read the signs and get around. I laughed when I saw this sign my first day in Heidenheim, Germany. The language of color spoken internationally! Photo credit: ©Cristina Acosta

Color communicates. Any color expert, designer or artist will agree with that statement. But ask those creative types what exactly a color is communicating and the answers you get may have surprisingly little in common.

Here’s why: Color is a language that continually evolves with the cultures that contribute the shades and tones of meaning each of us sees. And, each individual brings their personal biases and perceptions to the mix, further complicating things.

Yes, you can open most any home decor magazine and read at least one color experts’ opinion based on a study about the calming effects of green – or beige – or . . . whatever the next color may be. But the truth is, the focus group that decides green is calming one year, may decide that mauve is calming next year. And, one more thing to keep in mind,  the experience of an individual and the particular mix of individuals in a focus group is always changing.

Consequently, the meaning of a color is a moving target. One person’s irritating red is another person’s energizing red. It’s all about time and place, people and perception.

So what do you do with this information when you’re standing in the paint store looking for an idea or some advice? Here’s a few tips:

• The first thing to do is to choose a group of colors you love that you think might work for the project. For example – If you’re choosing exterior home colors and are looking for 3 colors, pick at least a dozen that you think will work.

• Then (ideally, take some time with this step) clip the color samples into individual pieces and spread them on the table. Start choosing your favorites.

• When you’ve narrowed it down to at least 4 choices, THEN start choosing where the colors go. Such as this color for the body, this for the trim, this for the gable trim, etc.

Remember that when you are choosing colors, you are bringing a lifetime of experience to the process. Respect that first with a little exploration, then listen to the advice you get from friends and professionals. You’ll have a better feel for the color choices that are right for you.

www.CristinaAcosta.com

Walking through the streets of Bordeaux, France I saw these beautiful faded purple doors. Against the grays and browns of the buildings and the weather that day, the violet color brought a subtle and rich dimension to the street view. Photo: Cristina Acosta

Inspired by the colors in the landscape of urban city streets I've been exploring the colors by painting textiles. The sheer matte quality of the silk is the perfect substrate to convey the feeling of the colors from the street in Bordeaux, France. My intent was not to replicate the colors visually as much as to convey the sensations I received while walking through the colors in that landscape. Photo credit: Cristina Acosta

I’ve been thinking a lot about color and culture, and have been exploring that theme in my fine art for many years.

The landscape around us effects how we perceive color. The geography of a place along with the cycle of seasons as well as the weather and light  combine with the presence or absence of human culture to create the colors of a place.

In my  paintings and drawings other concerns (like image or texture) overtake this concept, so I decided to work with these color ideas in textiles.

Painting silk scarves for myself or friends is a relaxing way for me to play with color stories.  (And I have something fun to wear when I’m done!) This week I painted this silk scarf directly from the inspiration of some recent travels. I’ve been fortunate to be able to travel with my teenage daughter, Isabella Barna during her fencing competition season. She competed in a few fencing World Cups, so we both enjoyed traveling to both small and large towns in Europe for the events.

The many changes in landscape I’ve experienced this year contrast in my mind, mixing with the sensations of place. Each memory has a different palette of colors and values. Playing with these memories and translating them to visual ideas allows me to re-live the sensations of the memories as I create visual structure around them. It’s sort of like selecting photos for a scrapbook page, I select among the thoughts and feelings of memory for the creative expression.

www.CristinaAcosta.com

One of the unexpected changes that can happen to the aging eye includes the color yellow. For some people the lens of the eye becomes increasingly dense and more yellow with age. With that change, contrast sensitivity declines and dark colors can be difficult to distinguish from each other.

The yellowing effect may not be affecting you personally, but if you are a retailer or manufacturer selling products, how your products are being perceived by the older customer with this condition affects your sales.

The color yellow is common in many natural landscapes throughout the year. I took this photo of bamboo stalks in Bordeaux, France while walking through the public garden in the downtown.

Yellow labels can “disappear” against a bright yellow background. Decreased contrast sensitivity can cause blue and black  or blue and green to appear the same. White or light colored type on a black or dark colored background may be almost impossible to read for that customer.

Colors not only affect people differently because of personal and cultural conditioning and experiences. The visual  abilities of each person affects how and if they perceive a color. Keeping in mind the possibility for differences in color perceptions is especially important for color consultants. Yellow is not always a sunny color.

Read more about the aging eye at LighthouseInternational.org

www.CristinaAcosta.com

Synesthesia is a condition in the brain processes that describes when the brain  mixes up the senses – taste, touch, smell, hearing and vision so that the person with synesthesia may experience a taste as a shape (for example) or a number as a color.

Though modern scientists first documented synesthesia in the 1880′s it wasn’t until recently with the aid of brain scans and other technology, that science has found a way to ascertain that synesthesia is not just a gift for metaphor, but is an actual brain condition.

In the article, Hearing Color, Tasting Shapes, by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward M. Hubbard, published by Scientific American, the authors discuss the phenonmenon of synesthesia and explain the possible reasons for the condition.

“Our insights into the neurological basis of synesthesia could help explain some of the creativity of painters, poets and novelists. According to one study, the condition is seven times as common in creative people as in the general population. . . . In addition to clarifying why artists might be prone to experiencing synesthesia, our research suggests that we all have some capacity for it and that this trait may have set the stage for the evolution of abstraction–an ability at which humans excel.”

Blue and yellow together create green. In this progression of colors from the master bedroom wall through the bathroom, blue and gold give the sensation of cradling the green. It's a comforting yet interesting arrangement of color.

When I walk through a client’s home, the colors, shapes and textures speak to me kinesthetically  as well as visually. And sometimes I get the sensation of a taste or sound, depending upon how the colors in the room interact. I never gave much thought to this ability until I read Ramachandran and Hubbard’s work. Then a way of experiencing the world that I had considered a personal idiosyncrasy  was suddenly something with a name that I now know is experienced by others.

When science “proves” something that artists have been perceiving, the necessity of the arts in education is even more apparent to me. People who have neurological wiring that gives them problems or  idiosyncrasies  such as dyslexia or synesthesia don’t often fit into the standard learning and teaching styles enforced in the average school. Including the arts in school curriculum allows these people to succeed and flourish and maybe someday, even become artists of one kind or another.

www.CristinaAcosta.com

The gold paint color reminds me of the sand of the beach near my childhood home. The addition of blue and green create a graphic triad of landscape colors in this stairwell area.

Visualize “fire engine red” and the color red rushes to mind with or without a vision of the wheels. It’s the same for “grass green”, “sky blue” or “chocolate brown”. Seeing color is such a natural condition that we often don’t question why we see colors and we presume that everybody sees the same colors.

Though most of us do see the same colors, some people can’t. Men (about 5-8% and about 1% in women) with congenital color-blindness may not even know the exact extent of their color blindness until professionally tested. And seeing the same colors is no guarantee towards agreement.

When I was a painting student in art school my professor asked me to randomly choose “Coca-Cola red” from a group of red color chips. I confidently picked a red, sure that it matched my memory of the color. When the professor produced a bottle of Coke and had me put my sample up to the logo, I was surprised to find my choice, though close, was not completely accurate.

Since then, decades of working with color and honing my color sense have increased my understanding of how precise the eye can be. For years I’ve mixed color as an artist, continually refining my experience with both the components of a color and how it appears next to other colors. I’ve also realized that my memories of  colors are only broadly accurate.

The color of the beach sand near my childhood home in Playa del Rey, California, is golder to me in my memories than the actual vial of sand from that beach that I collected for a keepsake. That’s because the expanse of sand and the light of the day make the color experience.

So, when I incorporated the gold of the sand into my home interior design color plan I went with the color that best bridged my color memories, the vial of beach sand  and the reality of my living room walls. I compromised between the color I held in my mind and what my  brain and eyes were telling me.

Learning about the neuroscience behind how the brain and the eyes  see color is the topic of Mark Changizi’s book,  The Vision Revolution. It’s a wonderful book from a man who describes himself as a  “theoretical neuroscientist”. Even if your interest in color is currently limited to what color to paint your living room accent wall, you’ll find that Changizi’s book will inform and enlighten your understanding of how the mind works and that how you physiologically perceive color affects your entire life.

www.CristinaAcosta.com Note: I have an affiliate arrangement with Amazon.com. Clicking on the icon for Changizi’s book and purchasing it through this link will result in a small financial support of this blog.

Playful young boy selling colorful wood and corn beads in Oaxaca, Mexico

It’s easy to stereotype a culture with a particular color palette, and Hispanic cultures, like Mexico are often seen by Northern neighbors through a lens  saturated with color. The tint of that lens, saturated with stereotypes can limit the perceptions within one’s gaze. It’s not always a bad thing. A stereotype exists because it identifies a characteristic, sometimes with a negative view and sometimes with a positive view. The problem with stereotypes happens when the stereotype overrides reality.

Mexico, Oaxaca city street scene is an example of natural stone colors mixed with painted vibrant colors. Note how this photo has colors similar to the beads the young boy is holding over his face.

The irony for me being an acculturated Latina born in Los Angeles is that I know that though Anglos from many cultures have representative crafts saturated with color, like Polish paper-cuts or Scandinavian tole painting, American Anglos will often focus on the colorful aspects of Mexican American visual culture while ignoring most of the subtle colors that are part of the same mix.

During the late 1990′s and early 2000′s when I was actively promoting my licensed line of signature home decor design, I was often  perplexed and baffled when potential clients would turn down my line with comments  that the colors were too bright. Especially when these same manufacturing companies were already heavily promoting the work of Anglo artists renowned for bright colors such as Laurel Birch, Susan Sargent and Mary Engelbreit.

Sweets offered by a Oaxacan street vendor display a variety of rich natural colors.

To this day, there are no Latina visual artists licensing their decor lines at the supported level of acceptance any of the above Anglo artists have achieved. Though I knocked on that licensing door and for a brief time thought I’d been invited in, I never was successful in my  licensing efforts at the time.

Though there is always someone who may claim sour grapes, I heard too many negative comments from manufacturers during that time that my colors and the style of my color use was  too particular to or representative of my Latino culture. The implied meaning was that the work would not sell. This happened despite an almost decade long successful national run of my imagery and design with my ceramc tile business.  A run that included years of free editorial coverage by mainstream mid-tier home decor magazines such as Better Homes & Garden’s Special Interest Publications and other periodicals.

The stone facade of this church in Oaxaca, Mexico, displays the variety of earthy tones similar to the street vendors tray of sweets.

With the perception of hindsight, I realize that what I was up against was a stereotype and a perception that I couldn’t vanquish. Though it seems so obvious to me now, at the time I never expected that  colors I painted with along with the link to my Spanish name would be inexorably linked with my Hispanic heritage in such a limiting fashion. Until then, I really thought that my talent and hard work spoke for itself.

When it finally hit me that my Latino heritage was the “elephant in the room” during my licensing negotiations, I redid my website and my marketing efforts, bringing the discussion of my Hispanic heritage front and center. I was frustrated that my art and the color stories I presented were only seen through the context created by stereotypes my potential clients could not seem to overcome.

During the ensuing years I’ve thought a lot about my experience with stereotypes and still haven’t found a simple or elegantly concise answer. What I know to be true is that the context my art and design were seen in by the manufacturers considering my line not only trumped content, it was a lens that obscured any content that didn’t echo their context. Why that context exists is a product of at least 150 years (the end of the Mexican War) of intercultural perceptions that have defined the U.S. and the complex relationship in U.S. society with Hispanic minority cultures. It’s a mindset that was too much for me to overcome.

For decades, American advertising that referred to Hispanics  in the U.S. has focused on the aspects of bright color within the Latino or Hispanic cultures without a nod to the rest of the colors present in the cultural environment. And like all humans, what we believe or have been prepared to believe is usually what we perceive to be true despite contradictory evidence.

I’ve included photos from a trip I took to Oaxaca to illustrate how opposite color palettes that are both bright or subtle can be culturally accurate. I chose photos from Mexico to illustrate the visual color concepts that are often associated with Mexican-Americans as well as other Hispanic cultures from other regions by the majority culture in the U.S.

You’ll see when you look at these photos that color schemes exist that are not always what we expect and where we expect to see them. Though I am asking you to look at the colors within a photograph, I am also asking you to look beyond  preconceptions you may have about Hispanic color palettes. Looking consciously is the first step to seeing clearly.

When we don’t acknowledge those things that exist just because we don’t want them to be there, we limit ourselves as a society. This is true whether you talking about politics, business or color. Everything is woven into our patterns of perception. Stereotypes are only a shorthand to perception, they don’t engender the clarity necessary for an inclusive society. And part of an inclusive society is visual representation at all levels.

Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month is an opportunity to celebrate the beauties and gifts that are part of our country’s  heritage  as well as to acknowledge the mosaic of cultures that make up all of the U.S. During these trying times of environmental, political and economic upheaval it is more important than ever that we work together as a nation to create the best future possible for our progeny.

www.CristinaAcosta.com

Note: Cristina Acosta is a color consultant working for a variety of clients – residential, commercial and institutional. Hire her for your color expert.

Contemporary home with ho-hum exterior colors

Contemporary Architecture New Color Plan with Addition of Gray & Blue over the Yellow

Are you ready for a home makeover but you don’t want to break the bank? Have you ever painted your house and when it was done, wondered why the paint job didn’t look as good as you thought it would? Changing paint colors doesn’t have to be a complete re-do. With a few strategic changes of color you can get the look and pizzaz you want by changing only the colors or areas that make the most difference, rather than repaint the entire exterior of your home.

The clients who built this contemporary residence engaged the architecture firm, Rainbow Valley in Oregon. The house, edged on one side with a grove of Oregon Oaks is a beautiful interplay of warmth and light that rests lightly on this hilltop in a Western Oregon Valley. The homeowners chose colors for the home under the duress of the final push before the home was completed. Though they liked the colors, they felt that something was not quite right. After they’d moved in and had a chance to live with their new home, they hired me to help them create a new color plan.

I asked my clients what they liked and didn’t like about the colors and listened to their answers as I looked at the intersecting shapes of the contemporary architecture.  Together we put together a color palette or plan that accentuated the lyrical aspects of the architecture while bringing more of the landscape colors into the mix.

Walking around the home I noticed how well the house integrated with the lot and the surrounding nature. Despite the often overcast skies in the area, subtle color was present everywhere. The beautiful gray trunks of the grove of Oregon Oaks, the many shades of green ranging from brilliant emerald to gray green changed under the movements of the cloud cover. Occasionally the clouds parted to reveal small patches of blue sky.

Keeping the existing green body color and the taupe trim color, we added a gray and a light blue to the exterior color story. Those two colors eliminated the existing yellow paint. With the yellow gone, the green appeared more vibrant. Adding the light blue color to the small front structure was the final touch that gave the front of the home a light-hearted lift.

Choosing colors for a home or business is more than just a few samples of  colors that “look good.” The best color plan is one that enhances the building, the surroundings and the lives of the people that live and work there.

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www.CristinaAcosta.com

For color consulting, contact me for both remote and in-person consults.