Colour Changes How You Feel: The Psychology of Colour in Art

 "Colour is a power which directly influences the soul. Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul." [1]

This is one of Kandinsky's most famous and foundational statements, written in 1911 in his treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Not a metaphor. Not an aspiration. A conviction: that colour bypasses conscious thought entirely and acts directly on the inner life of whoever encounters it. Something felt before the mind has had time to form an interpretation, a symbol, a meaning, or a judgment.

People have always felt this, long before it was written down or measured. Artists were among the first to use it deliberately, as an instrument: to move, to provoke, to soothe, to awaken. Science, as it often does, has spent the centuries since trying to prove what humanity has always known.

What Colour Does to You

Stand in front of a painting that uses colour boldly and something happens before you have had time to form an opinion about it. The body responds first. Attention sharpens or softens. Energy shifts. A sensation arrives ahead of thought, and it is not imagined.

Colour does not simply enter the eye and register as information. It travels deeper. The reason lies in how the brain is wired: colour signals are processed not only in the visual cortex but passed almost immediately to the limbic system, the region governing emotion, memory, and instinctive physical response. This pathway evolved long before language or conscious reasoning, which is why the emotional response to colour is so fast and so difficult to override. Warm hues trigger heightened arousal because the brain interprets them as signals of energy, heat, and urgency. Cool hues produce calm because they are neurologically associated with distance, space, and rest. These responses show up in measurable physiological data: heart rate, skin conductance, neural activity, as documented by Lisa Wilms and Daniel Oberfeld at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, published in Psychological Research in 2018 [2], findings that have since been confirmed across numerous studies and research institutions worldwide.

This knowledge has long been applied in the world of marketing and branding. Coca-Cola's red is not accidental: it signals energy, excitement, and urgency. McDonald's yellow and red combination was chosen precisely because red stimulates appetite while yellow evokes warmth and optimism. Brands have understood and exploited colour psychology for decades. But in painting, colour operates at a different level entirely. It is not a signal designed to sell. It is one of the primary languages of art, one that speaks directly to the subconscious before the conscious mind has had the chance to respond.

In a painting, colour is the primary language. There is nothing competing for that signal. It reaches the limbic system directly and completely, landing in the part of the brain that governs emotion and instinctive physical response before conscious thought has had time to form. The brain does not process it as background, but as an event, something that demands a response. Mood shifts. Energy changes. A sense of calm or alertness settles in, often without the viewer being able to explain why. Colour acts on the viewer before they have even registered what the painting depicts.

Colour Is a Universal Language

Unlike symbolism, which shifts across cultures and histories, or narrative, which requires shared reference, the basic emotional language of colour is something close to universal. Research by anthropologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, examining colour terminology across 98 languages, found that despite vast cultural differences, all human languages share the same fundamental colour categories: the same basic perception of blue, red, yellow, green [4]. The sky is blue. Grass is green. Fire is red. These associations are not learned from a book. They are woven into the human experience of being alive on this planet, and the emotional resonances that come with them are felt before they are named.

This universality is part of what gives colour in art its particular power. Across centuries, cultures instinctively understood that colour carried authority and meaning. In ancient Rome and the Byzantine Empire, purple was so potently associated with power and divine right that by the fourth century AD only the Emperor himself was permitted to wear it. The colour alone was enough to communicate sovereignty, without a single word [5]. Rulers across history dressed in the most vivid, saturated colours available, not merely for decoration, but because they understood, instinctively, that colour speaks to people before reason does.

It Is Not Just Which Colour, But How

Most people think of colour psychology in familiar terms: red excites, blue calms, yellow uplifts. These associations are real, but they are only part of the picture.

What research has shown is that the saturation and brightness of a colour often matter more than the hue itself. A vivid, high-contrast, fully saturated colour produces a measurably stronger emotional response than the same hue rendered softly. The intensity of a colour is inseparable from the intensity of feeling it creates. A 2025 study published in BMC Psychology by researchers at Liaoning Normal University and Dalian University of Technology, China, confirmed that brightness and saturation produce significant and measurable differences in emotional response across different viewers, independently of hue alone [3].

The implication for painting is direct. A canvas with bold, saturated colour and strong contrast changes the emotional temperature of any room it enters. It raises energy, demands presence, creates a kind of aliveness in the space around it. A quieter, more restrained palette does something different: it settles, it breathes, it allows the mind to slow. Neither is better. But neither is neutral. Every painting is making a choice, and that choice lands in the body of the viewer whether they are aware of it or not.

Danny O'Connor: When Colour Becomes an Experience

This is where the research stops being abstract and becomes something you can stand in front of.

The Liverpool-based painter Danny O'Connor works at precisely the intersection these studies describe. His canvases are built through contrast: clean, flat zones of vivid colour set against explosive passages of spray paint, drips, and raw gestural energy. The surfaces are layered, charged, and deeply present. When you encounter one of his paintings, the response is immediate and physical before it is intellectual. The eye lands on colour first. The mind follows. Something shifts.

But what makes O'Connor's work particularly striking is what happens after that initial charge. His figures emerge from fields of colour that feel less like backgrounds and more like emotional climates, somewhere between the vivid and the dreamlike. The colour pulls you in and then holds you somewhere unexpected: alert and yet strangely calm, stimulated and yet oddly at ease. It is a quality that is difficult to describe but immediately recognisable, and it stays with you long after you have moved away from the painting.

And colour, while central, is only one dimension of what O'Connor brings to a canvas. His work is equally rich in symbolism, in compositional tension, in the layered technical language that rewards sustained looking. The colour opens the door. What lies behind it is more complex, and more rewarding, than a first glance suggests.

This is what colour in painting, at its most considered, can do. Not decorate. Not illustrate. Reach into the viewer and leave something behind.

If you would like to experience this for yourself, O'Connor's work is currently on view at Eclectic Gallery. We would be glad to welcome you.

Bibliography

[1] Kandinsky, W. (1911). Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Translated by M.T.H. Sadler. Full text via Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5321

[2] Wilms, L. and Oberfeld, D. (2018). "Color and emotion: effects of hue, saturation, and brightness." Psychological Research, Vol. 82(5), pp. 896–914. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00426-017-0880-8

[3] Zhang, Y. et al. (2025). "Comparative analysis of color emotional perception in art and non-art university students." BMC Psychology. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40359-025-03034-y

[4] Berlin, B. and Kay, P. (1969). Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. University of California Press. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms

[5] Wikipedia. "Tyrian Purple." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrian_purple