‘We cannot easily define the experience of colour, despite the fact that all of our experience is coloured somehow’.
- Anders Michelsen (2006)1
By utilising the concept of the psychophysical landscape2 as way to define a product of art that is informed by both the internal and external experience, this essay explores how Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Andy Warhol (1928-1987) and Derek Jarman (1942-1994) have communicated through colour to translate experiences surrounding the apprehension and certainty of mortality.
By acknowledging art as a manifestation of phenomenology (a field of study in individual perception), colour can be addressed as a core vessel in materialising an artist’s experience and psychophysical landscape. And through embedding complex ideas like emotion and experience into a subjective property like colour, there is an additional emphasis on how the viewer can (also) engage (or disengage) with a work and navigate their own emotional association towards those abstracted concepts.
Death, as an experience that is universally recognised, is also emotionally complex — in that it rejects tangible apprehensions and visual ways of articulation. Therefore, it is often described by means of expression that are malleable alongside its subjective nature. Through looking at colour under this conceptual lens, a group of researchers from Wuhan Textile University suggest that ‘Form has a more rational quality’ while ‘colour does not convey a clear message, and therefore has a more emotional and personal quality.’3 By rejecting death as a fixed, objective reality (i.e., the images used in tabloid photography), and rooting it in something much more open and emotional like colour, these complex ideas concerning the psychophysical can be unpacked.
1 Michelsen in Eliasson, 2006, p.42.
2 Bekker and Bekker 2009
3 Pan et al 2023, p.28.
As such, by engaging less with the art product itself and more with the conversation and process of artistic production,this essay concentrates on evaluating three core works by Derek Jarman and Vincent van Gogh: Blue (1993), Chroma (1994) and The Garden of the Asylum (1889), before turning to Andy Warhol’s Death and Disasters series (1962-1964). The temporal disjunction of this essay is essential, if not intriguing, as it resists historical linearity in favour of a more timelessly considered exploration rooted in the fundamental idea of sensibility. By addressing each artist in this order, it focuses on the mutual ideas expressed by Jarman and Van Gogh in their considerations of colour and the psychophysical space, particularly in the build up to their death. That narrative is then juxtaposed with Warhol, and his practice with colour in disrupting the apprehension of mortality.
