GERDA DABASINSKAITE
Visual Artist
WRITINGS
SHORT ABOUT COLOUR
Colours have a deep subliminal meaning in our lives, they can affect our thinking, or they can help us communicate, reflect our emotions and tell our stories. A lot of artists and designers might use colour to communicate or bring out a specific reaction from the audience. It is indispensable to our life, to our history and culture. There were many scientists and artists like Goethe, Kandinsky and Matisse who were trying to resolve what colour actually is, why and how it affects us, but even after centuries of explorations we still do not fully understand it.
We learn by exploring the world primarily through our senses of sight and hearing, that is why I think it would be nearly impossible to imagine a monochromatic world, so many details and stories would be lost without the energy of colour. Children see colour with fresh eyes, they see it as fun, happy and beautiful. Growing up we start using colour as another way of communicating, we start associating it to certain objects, different moods and emotions or even sounds, and this mystery and confusion around it were enough to pull me into it.
I don’t see any reasons to restrict colour, define what it is or what it’s supposed to mean. I don’t want to follow any systems or guides on how it should be used, but I want to remind people that it exists, as a beautiful and fun ‘material’, making our world much more unique.
One of my favourite artists, David Batchelor, has collected piles of cheap colourful objects like clothes pegs, buckets, children’s toys, and kitchen utensils that he finds in pound shops and markets and creates wonderful work that gives a new life to colour and objects that other people disregard and forget. It is incredibly inspiring the way he displays colour in these regular objects in a way that it makes the viewers take a step to get a closer look and notice, as Batchelor says himself: the strangeness that’s within the most ordinary things in the world.
This is where my fascination began, so I try to apply that same principle in the way I create. My goal is to remind people of the beauty of colour and our surroundings by placing it in the scenes of my collages, sculptures and installations.