How your heart sees art
Share this article
You may think that you need to understand art to enjoy it. But art is not experienced in the mind. It works through the body, in the way that we see, feel, and respond to visual stimuli. It all happens on a deeply human level, and within fractions of seconds. Whether you know it or not, you already know how to appreciate beautiful things like art. Here’s how it works…
How We See Is How We Feel
Sight is often thought of as a rational sense, but it’s actually physical. Your eyes detect light, which are tiny physical particles called photons. The rods and cones in your retina register their intensity and wavelength, thereby translating light into the building blocks of visual experience. This input is then sent to the brain for interpretation, which helps you to navigate the world.
Colours are simply light at different wavelengths. They aren’t actually seen. Your eyes feel them. The longer the wavelength, the warmer the sensation. Reds, oranges, and yellows, for example, invoke energy, passion, and heat, while shorter wavelengths like blues and purples convey cooler feelings of calm, distance, or even sadness.
These responses happen before conscious thought. Your body feels colour tones before your brain assigns meaning to it.
Colour as a Primal Language
Emotional reactions to colour are rooted in your experience as a human being. It’s evolutionary knowledge that’s embedded in you. Blue recalls the vastness of the sky and ocean. Red suggests fire, blood, and urgency. These associations are not learned. They are wired within us for survival reasons and are deeply primal. It’s why feeling at peace around blue tones or become energized by warm hues are universal human experiences.
Colour taps into this primal vocabulary as your body recognizes the emotional temperature of the palette used in an artwork. For example, the phrases “warm smile” or “cold shoulder” are pretty common. These are ways that we describe our inner emotional landscape which, like warmth and cold, are not necessarily physical sensations.
What Artists Are Really Saying
Artists use colour not only for beauty, but for meaning too. They balance hue and contrast to guide emotional responses from the canvas. Their aim is to communicate, and the colour relationships they use in a piece of art can also shift with context. For example, Red’s may energize on white backgrounds but might feel threatening on black ones. That’s why the same artwork can evoke different feelings in different spaces, or even people. The ability to associate colours in way that accurately communicates an inner and invisible feeling is what makes art an art.
Art that Speaks to You
Art isn’t something to solve. It’s something to feel and experience. Your eyes are the doorway, but your heart is its brain, and it’s always listening. All you need to do is look.