Color As Unified Field Theory

Theories about color are a big topic, one that I will undoubtedly be revisited in future posts.  I stumbled upon this particular idea of color when I began to see connections with my experiences in plein air painting with science’s Unified Field Theory and Buddhism’s concepts of Non-Duality and Shunyata.  Each in its own way refers to everything being one, all things are all things and dividing them or talking about them is merely a conceptual exercise created by humans for the purposes of communication.

Ive been drawn back to this concept many times in many contexts from meditation practices to relationships and I'm finding it very present in my painting practice as I try to translate what I see into color on my palette or viceversa.  Its a curious process looking so intensely at objects and vistas breaking them down into color.  This process completely dissolves all conceptual aspects attached to things and results in a similar experience of seeing the world after months of daily meditation.  It is of course not the same since the meditation opens experience in a more broad holistic sense while painting opens it particularly to visual perception.

Back to the title of this article and color's relation to science’s Unified Field Theory.  This theory refers to science’s search for a theory that explains everything from the largest planets to the smallest particles.  This quest has led to some incredible discoveries such as String Theory but has at the same time failed to fulfill its goal of a single theory for everything.  I find this to be one of the greatest parallels between Science and Art since Art has always struggled and quested for the unattainable and in doing so has found some unfathomable depths.  Real science (not the kind they often teach in schools) and mathematics for that matter is one of the greatest most imaginative fields of our species and art is right along side it plumbing the soul of the unknown.  In this way I think color has much more to offer than I've ever been able to fully explore.  Many have done amazing things with color in the field of Art; Rothko, Pointillism, Tantra paintings just to name the few off the top of my head.  However can color be taken into the fields of science in a way that resembles science fiction where the questions are as unreal as our imagination but the findings are very real?  Mathematical geometry gets near this when it calculates multiple spatial dimensions beyond the third.

All this hypothesizing about color began with realizing the emptiness of things as they exist only as color and then finding the Dumond Palette and the Munsell Color Wheel.  Both of these I had seen before but had never read about their conceptual basis and their application to painting which I found really interesting in how it segmented color into more manageable conceptual pieces for studying and mixing.  In this way it shows how similar color is to the fabric of reality in that undivided it is not understandable conceptually but once it is broken into smaller and smaller pieces it can be more of a tool but less of its true self.   This is possibly why every painting is destined to be a failed representation of reality and every scientific theory is destined to never reach a complete theory of everything being unified since reality requires no such theory to simply be unified.

Be well

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