Meaning of Psycolorism: Awakening

‘Psycolorism’, as I have named it, is created through colour combinations, which touch the observer predominantly at a depth-psychological level, as well in the fibres of the soul.  Use of the colour pairs of the so-called Aura-Soma colour system, which have been gradually available since 1984 is currently the most appropriate example. In suitable cases where these are used, the observer can be reached at such a deep biophysical (cellular) level that healing effects are possible, as the individual is reached, touched and affected at the planes of their existence, and dormant potential forces for renewal are awakened. 

In the development of the Aura-Soma colour system, the English woman Vicky Wall (1918-1991) was influenced in part by the theory of Chakras and their specific colours. Chakras are the main energy centres of our body.

Born at a time when - triggered by rapid information technology and transportation - terms such as emotional security, patience, loving kindness, belonging or home are noticeably becoming foreign concepts for individuals, the concept of the “spiritual” is of great importance. In the creation of Psycolorism, I have accordingly incorporated the latest research findings from psychology and the humanities of the 20th Century.

I must begin the specific explanations with a significant note on the human personality structure: I personally do not know very many people who can categorically distinguish between the terms of the ‘id’ and the ‘ego’ and between the ‘ego’ and the ‘self’ and when they think they fully understand it, the relatively established yet fairly unknown psychological concept of the ‘super ego’ certainly seems to confuse them. And if one were to then add the so-called ‘higher self’ to that, they would be totally overloaded and the insight would be lost.

This confusion is further fuelled in German by the current use of the English terms ‘heart’ and ‘soul’, which unfortunately find themselves used in a rather haphazard manner and are often confused’. ‘Heart’ however, categorically means the ‘super-ego’ and ‘soul’ means quite specifically the ‘higher self’, which incidentally in professional circles is also splendidly referred to as the 'soul self’. It should be said that Psycolorism is a style of painting, which is based on a spiritual concept that brings structure and order to the above confusion. This fact will prove to be essential when we compare it to painting styles such as Surrealism or of Expressionism (see below).

Psycolorism attempts to draw on a direction of visual art, which regards itself as a kind of lifetime’s achievement and establishes: achievement means the flow of energy and that requires forces. Forces can in turn emerge and act where there are differences in tension. In painting we have the term ‘colour tension’. Colour tension comes from the colour wheel where complementary colours lie diametrically opposite to each other and guarantee the highest possible colour tension within a composition. Psycolorism now raises this type of tension - we talk of potential energy - to higher state of being than the biophysical. Concentrated energy is loaded at higher levels than previously and discharged in the painting process and then provided to the observer. Such visual information is, in abstract terms, structured energy which responds to existing Chakras as energy centres of our body. Considered in this way, pictures painted in a psycolorist method are also always strong energy images with the potential to touch the observer inwardly and awaken them at a deeper level.

Ultimately, Psycolorism - in the context of visual arts - is about bringing love (the core theme of all religions) and truth (the core theme of all sciences) closer together. Interested readers can find further remarks on this in the third part under the heading “Psycolorism provides an outlook”

The creative process of each artist is always a confrontation with one’s own life and therefore inevitably also a reaction to the political, societal, ecological, technological, economic, religious and philosophical environment.

The founding of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in 1855 reflects the start of the machine age in Switzerland and the camera in particular granted the painting of the outgoing 19th Century the freedom to shed its traditional role of faithfully depicting nature.

The following painting eras which are briefly touched on, such as Impressionism, Dadaism, Cubism, Surrealism, Futurism, Suprematism and Expressionism were all, in their own way, partly 

- a protest against societal traditions

- a break with academic doctrines

- a reaction to technical-scientific achievements

- a response to the tragedy of wars on a historic scale

- an expression of hope for a cosmic dimension of human dignity.

Impressionism (1870-1920) broke with the academic doctrines of painting as a purely representative function. It placed light and its atmosphere above the importance of colour as colour became the carrier of light. The traditional composition was abandoned in favour of a randomly selected detail of the image and this randomness of location was effectively complemented by the immediacy of time: Impressionists liked to try to capture the atmosphere of the moment in their painting and for the first time a type of subjective realism emerged.

Dadaism (1916-1970+) was directed against the conventional, particularly against the bourgeois culture and its value system around the First World War. Themes such as beauty or abstraction were caught up in a maelstrom of satirical exaggeration, which at times escalated to an absurd world view.

Absurdity was also a common feeling pervading the then growing field of quantum physics, which came to recognise that concrete images of elementary particles hitherto considered absolute - called ‘imaginary’ in mathematics - inevitably had to yield to wave functions that, in atomic physics, only allowed for probability interpretations of particle states at that point. Einstein, for example, tried to confront this absurdity with the phrase “God does not play dice”. 

This situation was evidently a coincidence of art and science.

In Cubism (1907-1914 with influence well into the middle of the 20th Century), the break with perspective became true. The idea of central perspective dates back to the Renaissance, when the art of painting became aware of perspective and thus an incredible push in science and research was triggered whereby the space itself became the object, and it became a research subject. Correspondingly, the disciplines of anatomy, space research, marine exploration, analysis of the body with its blood vessels and nerve paths, microcosm, among others, were gradually established.

This break was enormous and in fact comparable to the discovery of four dimensionality of space-time in physics, in particular in the special and general theory of relativity. This unexpected freedom with regard to the treatment of space and time had an enormous effect on painting. The meaning of the geometry of an object, which until then was regarded as absolute, was greatly changed. In a manner of speaking, in Cubism geometry for the visual arts was simply reduced to what grammar is to writing. The fact that an object could be viewed from different sides simultaneously, the time that one would otherwise have needed to walk around the object is effectively integrated into the image and the space-time became reality, just as in relativistic physics. Yet again we discover an amazing coincidence between art and science.

In Futurism (1909-1930) Cubism gained additional visual stimulation. The literary scene was more greatly influenced by it than painting. The language was enriched through Futurism by the concept of ‘avant-garde’.

Surrealism (1920 - present) after the First World War oriented itself against Western values. Artists sought freedom from constraints, searched the whole person, their real thinking without rational control. The everyday was given a space, the dreams of people, the chance of life, the miraculous. A symbolic language of form permeated and connections to depth psychology, psycho-analysis and dream interpretation of archetypes became apparent.

And again, we recognise coincidence and synchronicity (C.G. Jung) between surreal art and the then growing science of psychology (Freud).

Expressionism (1911-1950) from the Latin ‘expressio’, again turned against societal tradition, particularly against the then reasonably established movement of Impressionism. The term Expressionism translates as ‘art of increased expression’. At the forefront for the artists it was about the immediate expression of their own inner feelings. The Expressionists found Impressionism moribund. They perceived the Impressionist style to be too little about the subjective expression of the artist. The Impressionist expression was for them a representation of a moment that was too fleeting and superficial and lacked an emotional element. Expressionists wanted to move the observer of their art emotionally and speak to them spiritually. The painters tried to translate their passionate, elementary experiences directly into the image. Disappointment, sadness, joy, tiredness, pain and fear are examples of such feelings and sensations, and they should be reflected in the images. Through the at times spontaneous brushwork, Expressionism is characterised in its works by mainly coarse forms. Deformation and two-dimensionality also became stylistic elements.  The dominating colours contrast with the shapes and are experienced as a direct expression. Reality is not accurately represented and its image is guided to higher levels of existence: psychology is incorporated in the painting.

Kandinsky (1866-1944) even gave Expressionism a spiritual dimension: The new pictures should be ranked in a development of art in which the individual works - with all their differences - are connected to each other on the basis of the ‘spiritual’ by an ‘inner necessity’. In his text ‘On the problem of form’ Kandinsky writes that the form of a work is “an expression of the inner content”, but most important is “whether the form has grown from an inner necessity of not”. What the ‘spiritual in art’ or the ‘great spiritual’ is, remains subjective. Basically, it was about explaining that for all the external differences, there is still something like a spiritual kinship of artists and art [from: Kandinsky & Marc, ‘The Blue Rider’, art exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, HATJE CANTZ Verlag, Berlin, 2016.

While in Surrealism spiritual components such as dreams were explicitly incorporated in artistic expression for the first time, Expressionism went a step further and also included the psychological level in the expression of artistic creativity.

In Suprematism (1915-1930) from the Latin ‘supremus’ meaning ‘highest’, pure feeling and sensation were placed in the foreground. Despite this approach, in my view the art did not follow a consistent enough direction of spiritual consciousness, let alone one of cosmic consciousness. In this form of artistic expression it essentially remained as fundamental geometric shapes, such as circles and squares, combined with a firm approach to colour. The black square was, for example, a basic building block. Yet an approach was apparent to drive spiritual movement components of Surrealism and Expressionism as well as psychological movement components of Expressionism forward, to even higher levels, to the so-called spiritual or cosmic level.  

Seen in this way, the movement of the Swiss artist Emma Kunz (1892-1963) made much more progress. As a researcher, healer, artist and seer, she developed her own forms and teaching of form and gave many colours clear meanings. With her core theme of ‘creative revelation’ she forged ahead within the meaning of Suprematism into the cosmic and thus deserves full recognition. The renowned modern art museum, Kunsthaus Zürich exhibited pictures by Emma Kunz in 1999 together with works by Joseph Beuys, Rudolf Steiner and Andrej Belyj. The topic was ‘Directive Forces for the 21st Century’. Emma Kunz knew that the interpretation of her works was a demanding task. “The time will come when my images will be understood”, she declared. She defined her technique as follow: “Shape and form expressed as measurement, rhythm, symbol and transformation of figure and principle”. In her view - despite her miraculous medical healing success - there are no miracles, only principles. It is safe to say that as a design principle, Emma Kunz’s system has influenced the concept of Psycolorism.

In line with the above, Psycolorism (1985 - ) fits remarkably smoothly into the development of visual art: The previous colour theories are systematically supplemented by colours of the Chakras and the colour pairs of the Aura-Soma system, which also stem from these. The spiritual (heart), psychological (mind) and cosmic (soul) are finally categorically drawn into the art of painting; the initiating movements from Surrealism and Expressionism are to thank for this.

For the sake of legitimacy, it should be mentioned that the theory of Chakras does not yet receive the same level of recognition universally. It has its roots both in Hinduism and tantric Buddhism. Chakras are also significant in Tibetan medicine and have also influenced Western theosophy via Great Britain around 1920. Modern yoga systems also work with Chakras. Those lucky enough to know somebody who can see auras for example, or even those who personally have such a gift, will know how real these phenomena are and that they are far from an illusion or hallucination. Indeed, it is all part of the miraculous potential of human perception and communication.

Within the context of the progressive development of human culture, particularly in the visual arts, Psycolorism holds for the first time the following comprehensive and systematic approach: it encompasses aspects of aesthetics, logic, eroticism, ethics and mysticism. The id, the ego, the super ego (heart), the self (mind) as well as the higher self (soul) find their explicit, categorical place [from: Jurczek, “Sun of Soul – Gravity of Love”: Diagram, art exhibition at the Collection Beyeler, Pratteln/Basel, ART-TECH Verlag, Lenzburg, 2015. 

Seen in this way, Psycolorism developed mainly from Expressionism. And both were, therefore, driven by Impressionism and its own enlightening beginnings, such as through the English Romantic J.M William Turner (1775-1851). How true that is for me, as I was deeply affected by Impressionism as a child and as a young man this then made way to Expressionism and now I personally represent Psycolorism.

The artist here works according to varying degrees according to following a notion, following logic, following ones nose, following joy and following silence. That is part of the psycolorist system. For years the text on my artists card has stated: “Creating art through light, colour and joy”.

Observant readers will also notice how strongly Psycolorism is linguistically based. My old German teacher at the grammar school in Zug, Dr. Werner Derungs from Graubünden, who himself attended school at the Benedictine Monastery at Disentis (founded 700 AD) and was highly educated in the systematic use of language, called the supporting diagrams for Psycolorism the “diagonal lines of the world”.

At a time when images will soon only be composed from computer pixels, where even a ‘virtual reality’ will be projected, at a time of impatient pressing of digital buttons, at a time with education full of stress and lacking a muse, at a time full of pseudo-communication via the internet, at a time lacking overview and foresight, at a time of robots in the service sector and drones in war, at a time of mass movement of peoples caused by environmental, religious and economic policy, at a time of easy money and capital debt, at a time full of constraints and dependencies, at a time where - for apparently economic reasons - a subject such as art history is cut from timetables in secondary schools, where history of science isn’t even included, it is all the more important to raise these two educational pillars and establish ties:

Man has always had two roots: he is always a believer and is always questioning. Until we are able to unite these two aspects of human being, whether we call them religion and science, or love and truth, or (life) art and research (& teaching) - and to that end at least establish ties - only then are we complete, or as the Hungarian saying goes: complete and therefore healthy. And the energetic and charged images of Psycolorism should contribute to precisely this overall health and an all-round well-being. If our innermost being is touched, it becomes the source.

From a practical point of view I am happy to share that, for my psycolorist works, I personally choose one or more Aura-Soma colour pairs consciously according to the envisaged theme and then work with this colour palette. Alternatively, I might determine the colour palette according to known depth psychological effects of colour combinations, or follow one of Emma Kunz’s guidelines and then get to work.

Another possibility is to paint a work free from such knowledge and then - if appropriate and possible or present - identify dominating colour pairs as Aura-Soma colour pairs and discover with a sense of surprise that the core theme of the work actually matches the written meaning of the colour system. When this occurs, I experience a great sense of tranquillity and fulfilment. Crucially, and similar to what Kandinsky and Marc said in their almanac ‘The Blue Rider’, “whether form grows from inner necessity or not” I say, “whether the result is harmonious from within or not, the effect was in no way forced”, and therefore the outcome simply occurred authentically and we therefore entered into the sphere of true teaching and receiving.

Edmond Jurczek

Lenzburg, January 2017