Colourful Wonderment

By Prim Sooksangchaya, 2021

Artist statement: In Opticks (1704) Newton writes: “...if the Sun’s Light consisted of but one sort of Rays, there would be but one Colour in the whole World ” (Newton, 2010, p.124). It seems to me that many of us have become oblivious to the variety of colours of the rainbow (and their combinations) available to our visual sense in the seemingly uncoloured light. We grew up and still are living in a colourful world! Do you remember how we as children loved colours so much that one of the questions we liked to ask a new friend was “What is your favourite colour” ?

This painting invites the viewer to revive our younger days’ joy for the ‘colourful wonderment’ out there in nature: the green of the leaf, the red of the rose, the blue of the sky, the rainbow of the water droplets flowing endlessly from a sprinkler in a backyard, to name a few. I also encourage you to find their reflections inside ourselves. See what colours, what wonders, you discover within.

Reference

Newton, I. (2010). Opticks or, a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/33504/33504-h/33504-h.htm (Original work published 1704).