What is colour?
Dr. James FoxColour is an experience: the colours we see and what they mean to us will differ for every human on the planet. What can art history, science, anthropology, literature and politics teach us about colour?
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"In many respects, colour's greatest challenge is - like music - it resists most attempts to describe it. Colour might be one of those subjects that simply can't be written about."
But that's not going to stop Dr. James Fox from trying.
James is an art historian at the University of Cambridge, a curator, an award-winning broadcaster and the author of bestselling book The World According to Colour. He's joining us in The Garden to answer the most fascinating questions we could think to ask him about colour.
And we're starting with the big one: What is colour? James has described it as a “dance between subjects, objects, mind and matter”, that varies from person to person, and even from species to species. Join James for a scintillating exploration into how colour works and what it means, touching on science, art history, anthropology, literature and politics.
Read this talk's transcriptTalk outline
50 minutes
30 minute talk
20 minute Member Q&A
James fell in love with art at the age of six and hasn't looked back since. He is now an art historian at the University of Cambridge, a curator, an award-winning broadcaster and the author of bestselling book The World According to Colour.
The World According to Colour Collection
"In many respects, colour's greatest challenge is - like music - it resists most attempts to describe it. Colour might be one of those subjects that simply can't be written about." But that's not going to stop Dr. James Fox from trying!Colour is an experience: the colours we see and what they mean to us will differ for every human on the planet. What can art history, science, anthropology, literature and politics teach us about colour?
Until relatively recently in human history, there wasn't a word meaning "blue". Of the ancient cultures, only the Egyptians had a word for this colour. What was everyone else seeing?
The colour white has been associated with purity for millennia in religious iconography, architecture and art. But has it come to represent something darker too?
The last 150 years has brought about the greatest revolution there's ever been in colour. How have we ended up living in a hyper-coloured world?
