Initially, I was trained as a scene painter in the college. I still remember those days my classmates and me would spend hours and hours on mixing colors in big buckets. When we mixed a color, we never saw it as a single color but a mixture of different colors, just like the CMYK switch panel in the Photoshop, though we had to do it with our naked eye. That training somehow got into my blood, and color has since become a very important element to my works.
When it comes to ceramics, color is much more complicated. It involves chemical composition of the glaze in relation to the clay, as well as the firing temperature and atmosphere; all these elements could make the end result so much unpredictable, and sometimes frustrating. That’s why it takes a long time to get the right color in ceramics. But again, I am so obsessed that I can’t stop myself from doing all these tests. It sounds weird, but for me, it is a pure joy to see all the nuances of color sitting together like a big family.
I think color conveys emotions. It gives characters to an object. It carries messages sometimes depending on the culture and history. And most of all, it could be very subjective and without any reason. You just like it!
One of my favorite books on color is Wednesday Is Indigo Blue by Richard E. Cytowic and David M. Eagleman. It talks about the fascinating creative mind of synesthesia: people who have peculiar sensory of colors in music, odor, or even in numbers and words. It is a very interesting book and I love the book title, I think it explains all.
I am not synesthete (I wish I were), but I think I am kind of trying to do the same thing by giving colors to my works, just like the way they should be in my mind. And I hope that one day, someone would pick up my work and say "That is just the color that I want!".
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