When Color Became a Question

It all started when this book came across my desk: Remarks on Colour.

One of the final pieces written by Ludwig Wittgenstein before he passed away from cancer. I didn’t open it expecting revelation. It wasn’t sitting there glowing with mystical energy, nor did it announce itself as a key to understanding the world. It looked like what it was: a collection of philosophical notes— fragments of thought, unfinished reflections, almost like sketches. But as I began to read, something subtle happened. Color stopped being obvious, and my creative side of the brain started to explore.

The Grammar of Color

Wittgenstein approached color in a strange way. Not as a painter would. Not as a physicist would. He treated color almost like a logical structure. To him, colors behaved like variables in an equation. Almost like X and Y in a formula. Certain combinations made sense. Others were impossible.

For example: we can imagine a reddish blue in the sense of purple—but we cannot imagine a reddish green in the same way. Something about the structure of color forbids it. Not physically. Logically. Wittgenstein called this the “grammar” of color—the invisible rules that govern how colors can appear, combine, oppose, and transform. Just as language has grammar that determines which sentences make sense, color has grammar that determines which perceptions are coherent.

And suddenly color was no longer just pigment. I approached the entire reflection by positioning myself as a vessel of color, allowing it to move through me as part of the experiment. I used my own body and perception to encounter the journey. And I must admit—I was afraid, but very curious, of what creation it will lead me to , a landscape, a portrait, a water color, an article like this one, and it became something bigger and greater than that.

The Architecture of Color

I realized Wittgenstein wasn’t trying to explain color scientifically. He was trying to understand how we think about color. How language, perception, and experience shape what we believe color to be. Primary colors appear to us as foundations. From them, the entire visible spectrum unfolds—almost like a family tree of perception.

Red, blue, yellow. From these emerge secondary colors. Then tertiary variations. But the world does not stop there. Color evolves. Beyond the traditional palette we encounter strange territories: metallic colors, iridescent surfaces, chromatic illusions, reflective pigments— colors that shift depending on light, angle, and movement. Gold. Chrome. Oil slick rainbows. Metallic Pink is just gorgeous isn’t it? These are colors that almost feel outside the system.

They behave like anomalies in the grammar of color—cases where perception stretches the rules we thought were fixed. And suddenly the palette becomes something far more mysterious than a simple wheel. I let the colors guide me, consume me and take me to speak a language.

The Limits of Description

One of Wittgenstein’s central insights is that language struggles to fully capture color.

We can name colors. We can compare them. But we cannot perfectly translate the experience of seeing them. If I say “red,” you understand the word. But the red that appears in your mind might not be the same red that appears in mine. The experience is private. And yet we communicate about it effortlessly. This paradox fascinated Wittgenstein: how something so subjective can function inside a shared language. Color lives exactly at that boundary—between the visible world and the limits of language. Reading Remarks on Colour didn’t give me answers.

The Artist’s Encounter

It did something better. It destabilized certainty. As artists we often treat color intuitively—guided by feeling, emotion, instinct. But Wittgenstein reveals another dimension: color is also a philosophical territory. It follows rules we rarely notice. Invisible structures shaping how the world appears. Once you become aware of this, something shifts. A painting is no longer just pigment. photograph is no longer just light. Color becomes a dialogue between perception, language, logic, and imagination.

The Quiet Revolution of Looking

What struck me most is that Wittgenstein wasn’t trying to invent a theory. He was trying to look carefully. To examine the simple act of seeing until it became strange again. And maybe that is the real gift of philosophy—and of art. To return us to the ordinary world with sharper eyes. After reading Wittgenstein, color stopped being decoration. It became a question for months.

And once color becomes a question, every surface—every painting, every sunset, every reflection of light on metal—suddenly feels like it’s hiding a secret structure beneath its beauty. One that we see every day. And almost never notice. I can explain my journey below, I had my camera on all the time, and conducted the self experiment Knowledge acquired through processing emotions and the relationship with color.

The conclusion of my project and my invitation after this experiment, is to look at the colors around you—not as labels we learned as children, but as living phenomena. Notice how light transforms them, how context reshapes them, how emotion alters the way they appear. A color next to another color becomes something entirely different. A color in shadow tells another story than the same color in light. Perhaps this is part of what we are meant to do as humans. To observe. To question what we think we already understand. To participate consciously in the act of seeing. Because the world is not only made of objects—it is made of perception.

And color may be one of the most immediate ways the universe reveals itself to us. So experiment. Allow yourself to be surprised by the simple act of looking. Stand before a painting, a reflection in metal, a passing sunset, or the color of a wall in afternoon light—and ask yourself not only what color it is, but what it does. How it changes. How it speaks. Because perhaps color is not merely something we see. Perhaps it is something the universe uses to speak back to us, and that can be a primitive language.