Wynn Gay

Untitled (Yellow-Red Loops)

2022

As a self-taught artist, I have pursued my love of painting for the past thirty years, exploring variations of abstraction and occasionally the natural world. My passion for working with a specific color palette began with a benign news story on NPR. Around 2009 they did a segment on Kellogg’s being forced to legally admit that the colors in Froot Loops all taste the same. I was dumbfounded that they even needed to admit that, but I became intrigued with how we all unconsciously associate color with flavor without evidence to support that notion. As an artist, I began to question what other attributes we associate with color, and how and why those associations carry over into other aspects of our lives. For instance, red can mean anger or danger or passion, while green means renewal, but also envy or greed. Some meanings are fixed in our zeitgeist, but we all have associations to color based on our own experience with everything from taste to mood to politics to fashion. Thus began my exploration of color, using the armature of Froot Loops’ three primary and three secondary colors, red, orange, yellow, blue, green and purple. While the genesis of this project in a children’s cereal may be unusual, it has led to a serious personal investigation into how color elicits feelings, emotions and even actions, and how those responses can be altered depending on the juxtaposition of colors, as well as by relative scale and space.