The language we inherit for color is already drenched in evasion. Call a blue “melancholy” or a red “passionate” and you’ve taken a shortcut through the body—bypassing the eye, the hand, the blunt material fact of the pigment itself. This isn’t some harmless poetic reflex. It’s a refusal to see color as an active substance, and that refusal has a political spine: the dematerialization of labor, the colonial extraction of dyes and minerals, the academy’s centuries-long preference for line over mass. I want to propose a different discipline—writing about color without metaphor. Not because metaphor is false by nature, but because the direct perception of color carries a charge that symbolic language discharges before you can feel it.
The Problem with Metaphor in Color Description
When a critic calls a painting’s ochre “earthy,” they aren’t describing the color. They’re describing an idea of earth—a bundle of associations: soil, harvest, the pastoral, a nostalgia for a pre-industrial world that never existed. The ochre itself is a specific mixture of iron oxide and clay, ground into linseed oil, with a particular particle size and a particular way of scattering light. Its warmth isn’t a feeling; it’s a wavelength. Treat it as a symbol and you erase the material history of the pigment: the mine in Roussillon where it was dug, the hands that processed it, the chemical reactions that give it hiding power. Metaphor, in this sense, works like gentrification. It takes a raw, specific thing and replaces it with a comfortable abstraction the reader already knows.
I’m not arguing for a clinical, laboratory voice. The goal isn’t to strip language of sensuality—it’s to relocate that sensuality in the physical encounter with the color. A cadmium red isn’t “violent.” It’s dense, opaque, slow to dry, with a slight tendency to bronze in thick applications. It pulls the eye because of its high refractive index, not because of some innate emotional charge. Learn to describe these properties with precision, and you open up a more radical aesthetic experience—one that doesn’t lean on shared cultural scripts but on the irreducible strangeness of matter.
A Grammar of Direct Perception
To write about color without metaphor, you need a vocabulary that doesn’t already belong to poetry. Borrow from the studio, from chemistry, from optics. Talk about hue—the specific wavelength, the pigment’s name: ultramarine, not “deep blue”; burnt sienna, not “rusty orange.” Talk about value—how light or dark the color sits on a scale from white to black, without calling it “gloomy” or “airy.” Talk about chroma or saturation—the intensity of the color, its distance from gray. That’s a measurable quantity, not a metaphor for “liveliness.” And talk about temperature—but only if you mean the relative warmth or coolness of a hue on the color wheel, a technical term painters use to create spatial recession, not a stand-in for emotional heat.
Texture and Body: The Flesh of Paint
Beyond these optical properties, there’s the physical body. Oil paint has a viscosity you can describe: buttery, long, short, thixotropic. A watercolor wash has granulation—the pigment particles settle into the tooth of the paper in a way you can map, not just feel. Acrylic forms a skin when it dries, a slight plastic sheen that isn’t “glossy” in a metaphorical sense but a material fact of polymer emulsion. These aren’t poetic flourishes. They’re descriptions of behavior, and they give the reader a way to imagine the hand moving, the brush dragging, the surface resisting.
Light and Space: Color as an Event
Color doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s an event—something that happens between a light source, a surface, and an eye. Writing without metaphor means paying attention to these conditions. A matte surface scatters light diffusely, so the color reads softer, less saturated. A glossy surface creates specular highlights that desaturate the color at the point of reflection. The same pigment looks entirely different under a cool north-facing skylight than under a warm incandescent bulb. The light’s color temperature, measured in Kelvins, shifts the hue. A vermilion under a 2700K lamp leans orange; under a 6500K daylight fluorescent, it pulls toward a bluish red. These aren’t subjective impressions. They’re physical transformations you can state plainly.
This approach demands a certain humility. It asks the writer to stay with the phenomenon, to resist the urge to leap from perception to interpretation. It’s a discipline of attention, and like any discipline, it gets stronger the more you practice it. Refuse to say what a color means, and you force yourself—and your readers—to dwell in what it is.
The Politics of Precision
This refusal of metaphor isn’t aesthetic purism. It’s a political act. Metaphorical language has historically been used to domesticate color, to make it safe for a bourgeois sensibility that prefers sentiment to substance. Look at how we talk about the colors of the natural world. “Forest green” isn’t a color; it’s an idea of a forest—a place of peace and renewal. But the actual green of a specific leaf—say, the underside of a silver maple leaf under overcast light—is a complex optical event. It’s a mixture of chlorophyll absorption (red and blue wavelengths) and structural scattering (the silvery hairs that reflect white light), producing a desaturated, cool green with a metallic sheen. Call it “tranquil” and you ignore the chemical and physical processes that produce it, imposing a human mood on a non-human phenomenon.
This imposition has a colonial history. The European appetite for “exotic” pigments—ultramarine from Afghan lapis lazuli, cochineal red from Mexican insects, Indian yellow from the urine of mango-fed cows—was driven by a desire for intensity that was then tamed by naming it “spiritual” (ultramarine as the Virgin’s robe) or “sensual” (cochineal as the blush of a courtesan). The material origins were systematically obscured by the symbolic meanings assigned to them. Writing about color precisely restores that material history, acknowledging the labor and the ecosystems that produced the pigment. It says: this blue is not divine. It’s a ground rock, carried across mountains on the backs of donkeys, traded for silver, crushed and washed and levigated by specific hands in specific workshops.
The Body in Color Perception
There’s also a politics of the body here. Metaphorical color language often assumes a universal perceiving subject—a subject who is, by default, able-bodied, neurotypical, and culturally European. But color perception isn’t universal. It varies with the structure of the retina, the number and distribution of cone cells, the neurology of the visual cortex. A person with deuteranopia doesn’t experience the “passionate” red-green contrast of a Matisse; they experience a specific confusion of hues, describable in terms of wavelength discrimination. Writing about color without metaphor makes space for these different perceptual realities. It stops pretending color is a shared emotional language and starts acknowledging it as a biological and physical event that happens differently in each body.
Practicing the Discipline: A Case Study in Red
Let me show you what this looks like in practice. I’m looking at a painting in my studio—a small panel, oil on birch, a single field of red. I won’t tell you it’s “angry” or “warm” or “vital.” I’ll tell you the pigment is naphthol red, a synthetic organic pigment first developed in the early twentieth century, known for high tinting strength and a slight bluish undertone. It’s been mixed with a small amount of burnt umber to reduce its chroma, giving it a density that pulls it back into the surface. The paint was applied with a palette knife in a layer about one millimeter thick, ridges where the knife lifted, creating tiny shadows that read as darker lines within the red. Under the gallery’s halogen lights, the ridges catch a slight specular highlight—a white sheen that makes the red in the valleys appear even deeper by contrast. The edges aren’t crisp; they feather into the raw wood, sealed with a thin coat of rabbit-skin glue that gives it a warm, amber tone. That tone interacts with the red as a complementary color, making the red vibrate slightly at the boundary—a simultaneous contrast effect Chevreul described in 1839.
This description doesn’t tell you how to feel. It doesn’t tell you what the red “expresses.” It gives you the red as a set of physical facts, and it trusts you to have your own encounter with those facts. That trust is the opposite of metaphor’s paternalism. It assumes you’re capable of looking, imagining, making sense without being told what to think. It’s a democratic mode of writing about art, and I believe it’s the only mode that takes both the artwork and the audience seriously.
The Limits and the Necessity
I’m not naive about the limits. Language is always a translation, always at a remove from the thing itself. No description, no matter how precise, will ever be the color. But that’s not the point. The point is to close the gap as much as possible, to refuse the easy consolations of symbolism, to stay with the difficulty of the real. This practice shares more with phenomenology than with traditional art criticism. It’s an attempt to return to the things themselves—to the color as it appears before it’s named and thereby diminished.
There’s a particular urgency to this project now, in a moment when color is increasingly dematerialized. We encounter most colors through screens, where they aren’t pigments but combinations of red, green, and blue light—emitted, not reflected. The screen red isn’t naphthol; it’s a hexadecimal code, #FF0000, a set of instructions reproducible identically on any device. This red has no body, no texture, no history. It’s pure information. In this context, describing physical color—the pigment on the panel, the dye in the fabric—becomes a kind of resistance. It insists on the stubborn materiality of a world that exceeds our digital systems. It insists that color is not just data, but stuff.
Toward a Materialist Criticism
What would art criticism look like if it took this discipline seriously? It would spend less time on iconography and more on the physical substance of the work. It would describe how the paint sits on the canvas, how the light falls across the gallery floor, how the color shifts as you move from one side of the room to the other. A criticism of attention rather than interpretation—one that amplifies the viewer’s perception instead of replacing it with the critic’s own cleverness. This isn’t a new idea. You can find it in John Berger’s best passages, in T.J. Clark’s meticulous descriptions, in Georges Didi-Huberman’s phenomenological experiments. But it remains a minority practice, swimming against a tide of metaphorical ease.
FAQ: Writing Color Without Metaphor
Isn’t some metaphor inevitable when we talk about color?
Maybe. But “inevitable” isn’t the same as “necessary.” Failing sometimes doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. The discipline is in the attempt. Every time you reach for a metaphor and then stop, you create a small opening for a more direct perception. Over time, this rewires your own seeing, making you more attentive to the specific rather than the symbolic.
How can I describe a color’s emotional effect without using metaphor?
You don’t describe the emotional effect. You describe the color, and you trust that the emotion will arise in the reader as a response. If the red is dense and opaque and pulls the eye, the reader might feel a kind of weight or gravity. That’s their experience, not a property of the red. Your job is to give them the red as faithfully as possible, not to pre-chew the experience.
What if I am writing for a non-specialist audience? Won’t technical terms alienate them?
Technical terms, explained in context, are an invitation into a shared vocabulary. They give the reader tools to see more precisely, rather than leaving them with vague impressions. The word “chroma” might be unfamiliar, but the concept—intensity of color, distance from gray—is something everyone can perceive. Using the term and briefly defining it respects the reader’s intelligence. Metaphor, by contrast, often assumes the reader can’t handle the thing itself and needs a familiar wrapper.
Does this approach apply to writing about color in film or digital media?
Yes, but the terms shift. For film, you might describe the color timing, the stock, the way the emulsion renders certain hues. For digital media, you’d describe the RGB values, the color space, the way the screen technology—OLED vs. LCD—affects saturation and black levels. The principle stays the same: attend to the material conditions of the color’s production and display, not just its symbolic associations.