Reacting to Matt’s thoughts about color, a reader asks whether Matt considers black to be a depressing color.

Matt responds:

I think black is the roadway.  If you look at a stained glass window and really study it, the figures are the roadways of where your eye travels from one spectacular color to another. I use black as the balance of white.  Neither one has connotations of goodness or evil to me; they are just manifestations of where your eye is going to be attracted.

White, to me, is the laser beam that you can’t get away from.  It tells you immediately:  Look at me, look at me!

But black says, Okay, you’re through looking at the laser beam; now let’s get on the road and see what the hell’s going on here.  You start looking at the lines.  Whether they make any sense or not, depends on you.

I believe art is in the eye of the beholder; it means one thing to one person and something completely different to another.  The lines are the same, but how we interpret them is based on how they affect us individually.  It is not the Borg; it is not the collective.

Black is very regal, very important, almost like the steel beams in a huge building, holding up the finest marble and glass, which we call architecture.  Underneath all of that beauty there has to be a strength.  To me, that’s the black line that holds it all together.  The structure.  To me, white is the spirituality which floats through everything, demanding to be looked at.  But as human beings, we need to have structure.  We will not allow things to just be what they are.  I think that probably comes after we’re dead, when we see the whole picture and how it has been conceived and how the universe has put all these incredible components together into something that is impossible to perceive in this bag of bones we live in.

So the short answer is:  Black and white are equal; both are good.

Matt