“Just think of the many games that proceed from pure perception to
fantasy: soap bubbles, parlor games, the watery color of the magic
lantern, watercolor painting, decals. In all of these, the color seems
to hover suspended above the things. Their magic lies not in the
colored thing or in the mere dead color, but in the colored glow, the
colored brilliance, the ray of colored light.”

—Walter Benjamin, ‘A Glimpse Into the World of Children’s Books’, 1926, translated by Rodney Livingstone; from The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, 2008.