(Roughly) Daily

From ochre to lapis lazuli, Stephanie Krzywonos opens a door into the entangled histories of our most iconic pigments, revealing how colors hold stories of both lightness and darkness. She begins…

OCHRE

Darkness filled Font-de-Gaume cave. But dark is not the same as the color black. Dark means little or no light. Black isn’t an absence, but a presence.

Font-de-Gaume contains the only polychromatic prehistoric cave art still open to the public. Lascaux, fourteen miles away, closed to visitors in 1963: the carbon dioxide and humidity from human sweat and breath was damaging the paintings. Outside the cave in daylight, large beige-grey marbled cliffs overhung the habitable cottages of Les Eyzies-de-Tayac and the ruins of human shelters around 40,000 years old. Here, in 1868, a geologist uncovered the bones of five Cro-Magnon skeletons, which, at the time, were the earliest known examples of Homo sapiens sapiens—us. Homo sapiens, in Latin, means the wise human. Inside the cave, 250 earth-colored images of reindeer, bison, woolly mammoths, ibexes, horses, and a wolf haunted the walls. Most of the animals were outlined in thick black lines and filled in with rich, earthy ochre paint.

Pigment, a form of nature, is an insoluble substance that gives color to paint and other materials. The melanin in hair, skin, and eyes is a pigment, so is the chlorophyll in plants. Ochre—found decorating 350,000-year-old paleolithic bones—is the oldest colored pigment used by humans. In 2008, archaeologists discovered a 100,000-year-old painting kit in a cave in South Africa which included ochre pigments, an abalone shell used as a palette, a stone for grinding, and bone spatulas for mixing and dabbing the paste. Ochre is life in the form of a paste. To make it, gather earth, specifically clay or rock from land rich in mineral oxides. If not already a powder, crush it, then mix with liquid like fish oil, animal fat, blood, or saliva. Ochre’s iron oxides vary in color, from pale yellow to brown and red, but the oldest documented ochre pigment is red. In the languages of the many ancient Aboriginal cultures who used ochre, there is no distinction between ochre’s color and its substance, ancestral land. We still use red ochre in lipstick.

In the cave, our guide, Blaise, told us that experts thought the artist, or artists, intended these paintings for worship, reverence, and ceremony and painted on scaffolding by the flickering light of reindeer fat. Blaise also told us the artists were tall and dark-skinned—we would call them Black. As a so-called “person of color,” this intrigued me.

Our battery-powered light was steady and still as it illuminated a bison placed so precisely that the natural lumpiness of the rock wall made its bulk look real. Blaise asked us to imagine how the movement of the flames would have made the animals look alive, their muscles rippling and quivering on a canvas made of rock. In front of me, a female reindeer kneeled, and a male tenderly licked her forehead. The image was around 16,000 years old. Between 10,000 and 11,000 years ago, as the planet warmed and our last ice age ended, all of the reindeer in these paintings retreated northward with glaciers or were hunted to extinction.

Blaise asked us to stand near a different wall, then turned on a light. An outline of an artist’s hand was inches from my face. The hand seemed to pulse. Maybe it was just my heart pumping blood behind my eyes. The artist had filled his mouth with the same ochre used to color the animals, held up his large left hand, then sprayed ochre paint against the wall. Whose blood, whose spit, whose fat was this? The artist could have been hunting, been doing anything else in sunlight, but chose to enter the dark to paint, to love what is, to record a reindeer kiss forever, or for as long as rock lasts.

These artists didn’t just try to capture what they loved—they left a warning. One motif in prehistoric cave art, Blaise said, was to paint the most dangerous, violent animals in the deepest part of the cave. We were not allowed to travel deeper inside of Earth to see them: Font-de-Gaume, this museum of prehistoric art, was re-discovered in 1901, and already people had destroyed too many paintings. The animals in the very back were a woolly rhinoceros, a lion, and the profile of a human face, on which a tear appears to fall.

Maybe, as reindeer herds dwindled, the artists were expressing their sorrow and regret. Perhaps the face is saying: if we are not wise, our loves can lead down hideous paths…

Continue around the wheel: “Museum of Color,” from @stephkrzywonos.bsky.social‬ in @emergencemagazine.bsky.social‬.

* Andrew Wyeth

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As we ponder pigment, we might recall that it was on this date in 1810 that a work in sympathy with Krzywonos’ first appeared: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe‘s Theory of Colors (Zur Farbenlehre, literally, ‘On color theory’).

Though he is, of course, remembered– and revered– for Faust and so much more, Goethe considered Theory of Colors his most important work.  In it, he contentiously (and incorrectly) characterized color as arising from “the dynamic interplay of light and darkness through the mediation of a turbid medium.”  Scientists have coalesced around (and built upon) Isaac Newton’s theory.

Still, Goethe was the first systematically to study the psychological effects of color; his observations of the effect of opposed colors led him to a symmetric arrangement of his color wheel, “for the colors diametrically opposed to each other… are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye.”  Indeed, after being translated into English by Charles Eastlake in 1840, his theory became widely adopted by the art world, most notably by J. M. W. Turner and later, the Pre-Raphaelites and Wassily Kandinsky.

As Ernst Lehrs wrote, “In point of fact, the essential difference between Goethe’s theory of colour and the theory which has prevailed in science (despite all modifications) since Newton’s day, lies in this: While the theory of Newton and his successors was based on excluding the colour-seeing faculty of the eye, Goethe founded his theory on the eye’s experience of colour.” Or, as Wittgenstein put it (in Culture and Value, MS 112 255:26.11.1931): “I believe that what Goethe was really seeking was not a physiological but a psychological theory of colours.”