Color Redux

A run down of great links on color, what it is and how we see it as well as how other species perceive it, how our perception has changed historically, and what we could see in the future:

• Firstly, a fascinating Radiolab episode on color (that I have already begged the whole world to listen to): http://www.radiolab.org/2012/may/21/

• Secondly, two articles that borrow heavily from the Radiolab episode but goes on to address how naming colors impacts our ability to see them in more detail: here and here.

• Thirdly, a TED Talk by an artist who has never seen color but, thanks to a device he has created, can now hear it: here.

And I'll throw in some of my own posts to round things off:

RGB Colorspace Atlas by Tara Auerbach and Mantis Shrimp
http://artsravel.blogspot.com/2012/07/rgb-colorspace-atlas-and-mantis-shrimp.html
Making Color: about Victoria Finlay's history of color
http://artsravel.blogspot.com/2011/12/color.html
Celadon Talking Jars
http://artsravel.blogspot.com/2011/12/celadon-talking-jars.html
Black's historical uses
http://artsravel.blogspot.com/2011/12/back-to-black.html
based on ARTNews's article
http://www.artnews.com/2011/11/24/the-color-that-wasn%E2%80%99t-a-color/
The making of red, orange, and yellow
http://artsravel.blogspot.com/2011/12/red-orange-yellow.html

RGB Colorspace Atlas and Mantis Shrimp

RGB Colorspace Atlas, Volume 2 (2011)

As part of Ecstatic Alphabets, MoMA has a set Tauba Auerbach's colorful books on view. These three thick objects display every color the human eye can see in a three-dimensional, ordered way. The museum plaque probably describes the project best:

"Human eyes typically have three types of color receptors on their retinas, each sensitive to a different range of wavelengths of light. The colors associated with these wavelengths are approximately red, green, and blue. Because there are three types of color receptors, it is possible to map the visible spectrum in a three-dimensional spatial model by assigning red, green, and blue each to a dimension. It is then possible to outline a cube in this space, where the values of red, green, and blue are visible on a gradient scale of 0 - 100% in their respective dimensions. These gradients combine to create the RGB color space cube, a volume in which any color can be located by a set of three coordinates. RGB Colorspace Atlas, both a sculptural object and spatialization of color, consists of three books. Each volume contains the entire visible spectrum mapped out over 3,632 pages, representing the RGB cube sliced in a different direction: vertically, horizontally, and from front to back."

Of course, the volumes at MoMA were behind glass cases, so no one can flip through them. This video helps you imagine it though: 

Radiolab recently did a fascinating episode on color (bringing in Victoria Finlay, whose book I wrote about, as a guest). As the Auerbach blurb notes, human eyes typically have three types of color receptors (although a few women may have four through a quirk of genetics). However, some animals have many more--and thus see many more wavelengths, and colors, than we can imagine. The technicolor mantis shrimp has 16 kinds of color receptors. Can you imagine what the world looks like to it? Or, for that matter, what an attempt at spatial representation of its color spectrum would look like?

For more about woman with four kinds of color receptors, the discovery of color, whether color existed in the same way to Homer and the ancient Greeks, and much more, I highly recommend the Radiolab episode.

Frankenthaler, Colors

Warming Trend, 2002

Speaking about colors, here are some colors dyed straight into the canvas. Helen Frankenthaler was one of the early, and female, pioneers of abstract expressionism, and she passed away this week at age 83. Good WSJ and NY Times articles on her career.

Mauve District, 2009

Red, Orange, Yellow

RED

A new red from the new world once took Europe by storm, as countries vied to find the secret to this mysetrious dye from the Spanish colonies. They did not guess for a long time that it came from cochineals, little white bugs on pirckly pear cacti. These charming little bugs still color nearly everything consumable and red: lipstick, Cherry Coke, etc. Yum.

ORANGE

Orange madder are long roots that burrow deep in the ground, so much so that in Holland there were laws forcing farms to pull up their madder every few years lest it burrow into the dyke. The mysterious ingredient that created the beautfiul orange varnish of Stradavarious violins has long excited speculation.

Not purple, but YELLOW

Fields of purple crocuses create saffron, an expensive golden yellow, first produced by drying the crimson red stamen of the perennial autumn crocus flower. Now most saffron grows in Iran, but once a small, punny town in England grew saffron in the Middle Ages: Saffron Walden. Their coat-of-arms features a crocus... walled in.

All these fun facts come from Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay. One more fun fact: Minium, which was the name for white lead heated turns until it turned "minium" red, was a popular color with Persian, Ottoman, and Indian artists in Medieval times. Their work then became known as "miniatures," which only more recently referenced size.

Back to Black

Martin Luther, Workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder

"...black really came into its own with the Reformation, whose leaders and artists led a full-fledged revolt against the pomp and display of the Catholic Church. Martin Luther is generally depicted in the most sober of blacks, while the era’s painters began to favor tenebrous colors in even their most dramatic compositions.”
-From "The Color that Wasn't a Color" article in ARTnews reviewing Black: The History of a Color

Making Purple in Mexico

Beautiful slideshow will take you through the traditional process of dyeing yarn purple with Murex in Oaxaca, Mexico. (Found this while inspired by my Colors book, even though I haven't gotten to purple yet. I did learn in my blacks and browns chapter that, similar to the Murex process, the color sepia comes from ink excreted by a cuttlefish.)

Making Color

Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay is a group of  digressive tales and fascinating anecdotes that together create a history of the colors that man has used. While bone black comes from animal bones despite some ghastly tales, brown was sometimes made with human remains, preferably that of mummies. White's history tends to be deadly. Artists had many options to create white before the late arrival of titanium white, but tended to prefer poisonous lead white. Aside from being deadly (so thus not a very good choice for the white lead facepaint ladies of a certain era used), lead white also must be used correctly or it will turn black (as it has in some of the Dunhuang caves in China). Knowledge of how to create and properly use such paints have often been carefully guarded secrets, passed down from artist to apprentice and in families. Deceitful colormen would create and sell paints that looked good, but didn't last. In fact, it is only recently that we expect paint colors to last. Perhaps that was on William Turner's mind when he knowingly used paints that would fade, and refused to touch discolored works up when people brought them back only a few years later.

Early paintbox, early 1800s

Finlay also makes the interesting point that it is only recently, in the past 200 years or so, that artists have been divorced from the creation of the paints that they use. The ability to buy pre-made paint and the change in social status from craftsman to artist occurred around the same time, probably not conincedentally. I've only read about how humans originally sourced and created the pigments of ochre, black, brown, and white, and I'm totally hooked. I can't wait to learn about the 'real' colors.

Color: Jessica Dickinson at James Fuentes

Just some lovely colors for a sunny fall day. Jessica Dickinson large color wash paintings are up at James Fuentes through December 11. The texture is achieved through layering and and scraping. More of her work here.