As a young child I remember scraping my knee while riding my bike. I made a sharp turn and fell onto the hot, black pavement.

In that moment, I could not breathe. The bright red of blood caught my eye and I began to cry, even though it did not hurt that much.

The color red brings me back to that moment. The black of the pavement and dirt; the bright white of the sun that beat down on my shaking body. White, black, and red are colors that seem to affect us the most. White is the smoothness of milk, porcelain, a blank, untouched sheet of paper. White is pure and clean. I perceive white as emptiness, yet I know that white light in fact contains all colors. I associate black with the depths of the ocean and the vast expanse of space. I think of black as city grime and dirt, while also picturing the sleek, soft texture of velvet. Red is what you see when you close your eyes and look at light. Red is inside of us. It is love from roses and pain from our first skinned knee. It is the excitement of an empty subway seat and finding Mars in the night sky.

Even during a walk down the street, the color red captures my eye. I immediately notice a red tulip growing in the tree pit and feel awakened by the sudden burst of color. The blinking red of the crosswalk sign catches my attention. Red reflectors on a bike caution us, triggering an emotion to become unconsciously more alert.

The colors in art can cause reactions because colors can evoke certain moods or emotions. Take, for example, Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” This piece is extraordinarily colorful. When we look closer we see it is composed of thousands of colorful painted dots that enliven the canvas. We feel the warmth of the sun and sense the happy, tranquil mood of the park goers.

Artists can convey powerful ideas in their work by using certain colors. These colors elicit emotions and intrinsic, universal themes. It is said that colors do not symbolize ideas themselves, but have become associated with important human events, such as birth and death, life and love. For example, white is associated with milk, angels, and snow. It represents purity, birth, and life. Black is associated with death and darkness, mourning clothing, coffins, the grave. Red is associated with blood, symbols of life, love, and war. Red, white, and black are emotionally evocative colors. Artists such as Kara Walker, Pablo Picasso, and Frida Khalo have used these colors in their work to elicit responses from the viewer.

Kara Walker’s use of the color white in her piece, “A Subtlety” (a subtlety refers to intricate sugar sculptures placed on tables during feasts in the middle ages), is a powerful reminder that growing, harvesting, and processing sugar comes at a human price. The color white, in this case not a universal association, evokes the suffering of slaves who tended and cut, carried and processed, sugarcane. The sculpture is a 75-foot sphinx with exaggerated African features and a mammie’s kerchief. The sphinx is constructed of foam, covered in refined white sugar, even though sugar is brown in its natural state. Perhaps Walker’s sphinx is white, not brown or black, to make a statement that African-Americans were forced to be something they’re not, just as brown sugar is processed into white sugar. Walker may use the starkness of white – sugar removed of all color – so we look at the powerful African sphinx without the bias of color. Or, to use a universal symbol of white, the sculpture may symbolize purity within the African-American woman’s soul.

Picasso’s painting “Guernica,” is a powerful anti-war statement depicting the horrors of the bombing of Guernica, a town in northern Spain, by the Nazis during the Spanish Civil War. This abstract, cubist painting has become an iconic symbol of pain, suffering, and the tragedy of war. The work elicits nightmarish, horrific feelings, and depicts the horrors of the bombing. The bombing happened at night and deathly black dominates the painting, except where there are white, broken, screaming, innocent forms of life. This differs from Kara Walker’s use of color in her sculpture, though both are intense subjects, in that while the black on Picasso’s canvas feels heavy, the eye almost drowns in it, the white used here feels light.

Red affects us much differently than black and white. Black and white appear serious, forcing us to look deeper into the image, while red startles us. In Frida Kahlo’s autobiographical painting, “Henry Ford Hospital” or “The Flying Bed,” six symbolic red ribbons are depicted emerging from her abdomen after her miscarriage. Her unborn son is painted red and depicted as floating above her, and the other objects symbolizing pain, sadness, loneliness, are painted red or in earth tones. The life blood hemorrhaging underneath Kahlo’s body is red. Red represents her love for the lost child and her husband, Diego Rivera, her mortality, and her inability to bear children.

Colors have universal associations for all humans. They can produce emotional responses based on our own personal histories, or that of the artist. Artists are able to communicate ideas by using colors associated with powerful symbols and depict connections with color to elicit emotions or reactions. A person may associate a special aunt with the color lavender or a brother with bright blue. Colors that have such personal meaning – associations with people, things, or events – can bring back memories. Color and art can perhaps stir the soul.