The Color You Cannot Name: On Pigment, Perception, and the Private Languages of Color

The first in an ongoing series of VSG conversations on color.

There is a color blue that arrives in dreams. Not a symbol, not a feeling — an actual shade, specific enough that waking up means spending the day chasing it back through pigment and memory. This is not unusual among artists who work with color. What is perhaps unusual is saying it out loud in a room full of people who each have their own version of this obsession, and discovering that the room has almost nothing in common.

That is what happened in a recent Virtual Studio Groups session devoted, for the first time, to color itself. Not color theory in the academic sense — though that surfaced too — but color as a private language. How each person in the group carries it, fears it, controls it, or ignores it entirely. The conversation ran long and could easily have continued. This is a record of where it began.

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The Red That Gets Away

The session opened, as conversations about color often do, with red. Red is the color that demands a position. You are either drawn to it or you keep your distance; it rarely permits indifference.

Gotza — a painter and multimedia artist working in Barcelona — has been in a conversation with red for most of her life. Red and blue together, separately, in sequence, in tension. They appear in her canvases, in what she wears, in how she arranges her environment. The pairing has stayed with her since childhood, not as a preference but as a kind of structural fact — the way some people are oriented by north and south, she seems to orient by red and blue.

In art school, she spent a concentrated period working almost entirely in red. The blues she tried alongside it were technically more difficult to control and more sensitive to the carrier material. She had dreamed about a specific blue shade, and when waking up, spent all day attempting to find it. With red, she felt more at home — by mixing different reds you get a richer red, using different mediums: wax, egg tempera, acrylic, oil. Red still holds. The bachelor exhibition showed only the reds, because there were more of them, and because they were exactly the red she wanted.

But the red she keeps returning to is something close to the color of fresh blood — not oxidised, not dried, but immediate. A specific shade that produces what she described as a physical sensation: something like the feeling before eating, a kind of anticipation that you can almost taste in your mouth. This can be a kind of synaesthesia — though she doesn't actually feel the taste.

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Teaching Color Without Naming It

Kai — whose background moved through architecture and formal art education — brought a different kind of knowledge to the table. He has taught color, worked through the canonical exercises, and retained the kind of structural understanding that comes from having had to explain something many times to people who don't yet see it.

He returned more than once to Josef Albers, whose exercises he used with students: two different backgrounds — say, black and orange — and the challenge of finding two different colors for the centre that, placed on their respective grounds, appear identical. The exercise sounds simple. It is not. What it reveals is that no color exists in isolation. Every color is constantly being negotiated by what surrounds it. The orange background pushes the centre color toward blue; the black background changes the required luminosity. The two colors you eventually find that "match" will be visibly different from each other — but context makes them look the same.

This is not a trick. It is what color actually does, all the time, in every painting and every room. The exercise makes the invisible visible.

He also spoke of atmospheric color — the way a swimming pool turns everything blue, or the way the quality of light in Barcelona differs from the quality of light in Sweden, and how that difference changes everything you try to do with color in those places. The observation landed personally for more than one person in the group.

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The Vocabulary Problem

There is a gap between the colors that exist and the colors that have names. One voice in the conversation put it this way: a person with normal vision can distinguish around ten million different colors. The number of color names in any language is somewhere in the low hundreds. The vast majority of the colors you are capable of seeing have no name at all.

What this means practically is that color has to be felt before it can be thought. Kübra — a painter who works in bold contrast — described using color the way others use language: as a vehicle for something that can't otherwise be said. In her paintings, faces carry magenta on the cheekbone, bright yellow on the forehead, not hidden in the underlayer but stated. The contrast is the point. She doesn't choose these colors by analysis; she follows what she needs to see. "I like powerful colors," she said, "not saturated or pastel." The paintings she makes and the colors she wears are not separate decisions — the same instinct governs both.

The question of what any individual sees when they see a color became, as the conversation continued, more genuinely open than expected.

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What Blue Actually Is

River — an artist who has been choosing blue for the faces of her sculptures, specifically to make them feel less human — offered something that stopped the conversation briefly.

Blue, she explained, is in many cases not a pigment at all. It is a structure. A butterfly wing is not blue because it contains blue pigment; it is blue because of a microscopic physical structure that bends light so that the eye receives blue. Look at a butterfly wing under a microscope and you will find no blue there. The same is true of human eyes. The same is true of the sky and of water.

Lapis lazuli is one of the very few natural sources of genuine blue pigment — ground from stone quarried in Afghanistan, historically so rare that it was used almost exclusively for the Virgin's robes in Renaissance paintings. Synthetic ultramarine, developed in the nineteenth century, is what almost every tube of blue paint contains today. When something says "French ultramarine," it means laboratory, not Afghanistan.

The conversation moved naturally from there to the other expensive and improbable materials that have historically been used to make color. Tyrian purple — the royal color of the ancient world — was extracted from a species of sea snail, thousands of which had to be killed to produce a small quantity of dye. Cochineal red, still used in food and cosmetics, comes from beetles that live on cacti; in Lanzarote, where the knowledge of extracting it has been preserved for generations, the same insects can be used to produce a range from blue through purple to pink and red, depending on the pH of the process. The history of color is, in part, a history of what things are willing to give up their color to us.

Someone offered a grim summary: if you were willing to kill, historically, you could have almost any color. If you were not, you were largely limited to earth tones.

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Color and the Body That Reads It

The conversation shifted at some point from the outside world to the inside one — from pigment to perception.

Yann, a photographer who works extensively with Lightroom, described a persistent discovery: when he wants to correct the color of vegetation in his photographs and selects "green" to adjust, he often finds himself adjusting the yellows instead. The vegetation is not actually green — or not only green. His eye tells him it is green, but the color picker tells him something more complicated is happening.

This is not unusual. The gap between the color we perceive and the color that is there — measurably, instrumentally — is one of the stranger features of human vision. We are not passive receivers. We interpret, compensate, and assume. Take a yellow banana into a blue swimming pool: you will still know it is yellow, even though everything your eye receives is shifted toward blue. The brain discounts the atmosphere and insists on the object.

This interpretive capacity is not evenly distributed. Some people have fewer photoreceptors of a given type, and so see certain colors differently — what is conventionally called color blindness, though the word implies a deficit that may not be the right framing. Gotza described an experience at an exhibition in Sweden: a visitor told her, after half an hour of engaged conversation about her colorful paintings, that he could not see red and green. He had found the work interesting. She had wanted, desperately, to understand what he had actually seen.

Another person described a friend who is an artist — also color deficient in the red-green range — whose work at art school was admired for its distinctive and apparently deliberate use of color. It had not been deliberate. What he saw as a careful composition of beige tones read, to everyone else, as an interesting and specific palette. A painting he began in greens and yellows would gradually shift, as he worked, into what looked to other eyes like autumn — the autumn arriving unannounced, because the transition from yellow-green to red was not visible to him.

There is a more unusual phenomenon at the other end of the distribution: tetrachromacy, in which some people — more commonly women — have a fourth type of cone cell, allowing them to perceive distinctions in color that most people cannot. Whether this constitutes an advantage is not straightforward. A finer resolution in one area of perception doesn't necessarily mean more color — it may mean a different relationship to the colors that are there.

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Sensing Beyond Sight

River took the conversation somewhere more speculative, as she had signaled she might.

She has been listening to a podcast — The Telepathy Tapes — that documents a phenomenon observed by caregivers of non-verbal autistic people: once they learn to spell, some appear to be able to read the thoughts of those close to them. The podcast eventually addresses something called mindsight: the capacity, reportedly demonstrable, to perceive color and shape without using the eyes.

This is not, in most Western contexts, a discussable idea. In China, she said, it is being taught to children as a technique, with measurable effects on academic performance. Researchers have documented that the visual processing area of the brain activates in people practicing mindsight — there is something happening neurologically, even if no one knows what it is. And the first thing that people are able to sense this way, when they learn to sense anything at all, is color.

Whether or not one accepts the phenomenon as real, she suggested, it is a useful artistic exercise: put on a blindfold, pick up an object, and ask what the color feels like. Not symbolically — physically. What is the texture of red?

The conversation that followed came from an unexpected direction. For Bosko, whose primary mode of engaging with the world is through movement, he described learning his third martial art in his mid-twenties, and a specific phase of training that lasted months: he could see, in some pre-visual way, which technique the situation required, but his body would arrive a fraction of a second too late. He knew before he knew, but couldn't yet act on it. Later, the timing closed. The knowing and the doing synchronized. He was describing something very close to what River had described — perception that precedes the senses, the body understanding before the eye reports.

Athletes experience versions of this. So, possibly, do certain animals: the mongoose, tested in slow motion, appears to anticipate the snake's movement rather than react to it — a gap between stimulus and response that seems to run the wrong direction in time.

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Color as Material

Seb's relationship to color is mediated by material. Her practice has moved through phases defined by the substances she was working with — seaweed, which is green — rather than by any choice of color in itself. The materials were chosen for conceptual reasons; their color arrived as a consequence and became part of the work without being selected.

Returning to painting now, she finds that yellow ochre has been waiting for her. It has always been the pigment she trusts: earthy, foundational, something that makes skin tones feel true. Everything she adds it to becomes, in her words, better and more satisfactory. She doesn't fully know why. She doesn't need to.

Bosko has a different relationship to color entirely. For him, color exists primarily in relation to material and movement. He does not have a favorite color. What he has is a visceral response to color on steel — the way painted metal behaves, the way light moves across a finished surface — that has been present since childhood. A painted bike, a steel object. That is where color speaks to him. Everywhere else, it is more like background.

Someone noted that color and movement might be the same kind of phenomenon seen from different angles: both are about how things relate to each other, about rhythm and composition and the moment.

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What the Conversation Left Open

Several threads were cut off by time rather than conclusion.

Someone was partway through explaining a technique — painting in pure value, black and white only, before introducing any color at all — when the session ran out of minutes. The name of the technique: grisaille. Someone else had wanted to share a link to a researcher whose work connects DMT experiences to color perception and synaesthesia. The connection between synesthetic color-number associations — one member sees numbers and another sees days of the week as specific colors, a private and internally consistent palette that doesn't match any children's book — and the broader question of how color is built in the mind was left almost entirely untouched.

There is a Scottish exhibition, encountered recently, that mapped the soil colors of Scotland's fifty-four counties onto the walls of the gallery — terracotta, yellow, pale pink — each one a pigment available for free in the ground beneath the place it came from. There is a tradition in Sweden of painting wooden houses the color of brick dust, partly as camouflage for class — to look like brick houses — but also because the iron-rich earth of that region produces a paint that happens to protect the wood from weather. One member worked with refugee communities, and there is a culture in Vietnam in which white is the color of death and yellow the color of sovereignty and earth, and red the color of the communist government that displaced them.

Color, it turned out, is not a single subject. It is a territory.

The VSG plans to return to it.

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This article is based on a VSG session on color, 31 May 2026 — the first in a planned series of conversations on this theme. Participants: Gotza, Kai Rennes, Kübra Kopruluglu Asanli, River Reishi, Yann Courté, Seb Bradshaw, Bosko Begovic.

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Ancient pigments — mineral origin

Organic pigments — insect and plant origin

Named shades — poetic and regional