artwork, watercolor by Ritarkived
White is a colour and not only for how we see it but also for the symbolic meanings we attribute to it. I remember the amazement and the enchantment in the mountains, when I was a child and the snow was falling. Even as adults we still continue to relive that magic. From the modern imagination of a Christmas fairy tale, to leisure and sport. What would winter in the mountains be without its ‘white’. When the temperature drops and the air is cold, the humidity of the clouds turns into tiny ice crystals. With the wind these tiny stellar decorations, different from each other, come together in multiple snowflakes, covering the landscape in an immaculate blanket, in the quiet of a suspended atmosphere. In winter nature is covered with snow white, spectacular and silent, leaving room for muffled sounds and the play of reflections on the surface created by snow crystals.
Leaving aside the ‘illustrated book dreamer’ I must say that the existence and use of white is sometimes obvious that you forget the positive and negative value that can determine and influence the choice. We give meaning to color and meaning. I think of the supremacy of white over other colours, almost a chromatic morality of an achromatic colour (it has brightness but is unsaturated, without tint). It has its own alterity: in the collective imagination it has always been associated with power and money or even perceived as having an intrinsic transcendence, a religious quality.
The blank page on which you begin to write. The w. It is innocent, intact and untouched. It is associated with the early morning hours when everything is light and cool for a fresh start. The colour that illuminates the everyday in a simple beauty. In the concept of white wall, the clean laundry, in foods such as milk, flour, a flower, we imagine ghosts in their white transparency and whitening from fear, the powder of chalk and talcum powder, the linen of the past, with lace and handkerchiefs … in China it symbolizes mourning, in Japan sacredness with a positive meaning, in some parts of Africa sadness and misfortune…
Then there is to clarify the misunderstanding of the idolatry of white in architecture: for centuries the Greek ruins and bleached bone Roman, were used by western aesthetics as a touchstone: by the architect Andrea Palladio to the marble sculptures by Antonio Canova, from the studies of Winckelmann to Goethe. The reality of the facts is that classical statuary was not necessarily white.
“God paints in many colours, but he never does it as well as when he paints white” (G.K.Chesterton)
How many meanings can the White take: white exalts the sense of space like no other colour, in homes it is appreciated for its properties: full of light intensity, it is sophisticated and elegantly modest, simple, easy and durable. It goes beyond trends: white walls, dyed in a milky colour will never tire. The palettes of white and off-white are used in design as in construction with any style. It is a powerful colour: layers of different whites inspire multiple different surfaces .. . It is an impersonal tint, yet capable of conveying a profound elegance.
Personalities according to the colour White
Those who love this colour reveal a tendency to fatalism, but at the same time express creativity and imagination and sensitivity of soul. Those who prefer White have a constant desire for change and are stimulated by the novelties that life presents them. He trusts others and all that the future holds for him, then creating illusions, sinning with naivety. Pragmatic and rational. According to some colour tests, those who prefer white are like an open book, they do not hide, neutral and independent, often perfectionist, critic of themselves and others. But with a great desire for simplicity.
White represents a situation of transition and is associated with important changes in life and in its ambivalence also includes its opposite as a symbol of death but also of rebirth of end and new beginning. The Yang is the white side of the Tao with the black dot inside it (to consider together). The word Yang can be translated as ‘sunny place’, because it indicates the luminous portion of the Universe, active associated with the sky to the fire and sun. The ‘white dwarf’, a stellar residue of weak luminosity that gradually cools becoming Yin the feminine, while the Yang represents the masculine.
