Posts Tagged ‘color’
“If one could only catch that true color of nature. The very thought of it drives me mad.”*…
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.”
“An ordinary life isn’t ordinary when you put a frame around a moment”*…
Joel Meyerowitz is a pioneer of street photography. He started in the early 1960s in New York City, using color film when most other photographers were shooting in black-and-white. He’s had exhibitions of his work all over the world, and has published more than 30 books. A retrospective of his work is scheduled to be shown in Berlin later this year, and he’s working on a new project of self-portraits. At age 82, he’s continuing to explore the medium of photography every day…
An interview with Meyerowitz, including his thoughts on street photography in the time of coronavirus (with memories of 9/11): “Ready for Surprise.”
* Joel Meyerowitz
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As we capture the moment, we might spare a thought for another extraordinary street photographer, Vivian Dorothy Maier; she died on this date in 2009. A nanny, mostly in Chicago’s North Shore, she took more than 150,000 photographs during her lifetime, primarily of the people and architecture of Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles– photographs that weren’t recognized until after her death.
A Chicago collector, John Maloof, acquired some of Maier’s photos in 2007, while two other Chicago-based collectors, Ron Slattery and Randy Prow, also found some of Maier’s prints and negatives in her boxes and suitcases around the same time. Maier’s photographs were first published by Slattery on the Internet in July 2008; but the work received little response. In October 2009, Maloof linked his blog to a selection of Maier’s photographs on Flickr [now collected on this site], and the results went viral, with thousands of people expressing interest. Maier’s work subsequently attracted critical acclaim, and since then, has been exhibited around the world. Her life and work have been the subject of books and documentary films, including the Academy Award-nominated Finding Vivian Maier.
Self-portrait
“Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone”*…
in 2016, Pantone 448 C (“Drab Dark Brown”) was selected as the color for plain tobacco and cigarette packaging in Australia, after market research determined that it was the least attractive of all colors. (The Australian Department of Health initially referred to the color as “olive green,” but the name was changed after concerns were expressed by the Australian Olive Association.)
Since 2016, the same color has also been used for plain cigarette packaging in France, the United Kingdom, Israel, Norway, New Zealand, Slovenia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
The ugliest color in the world.
* Dorothy Parker
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As we throw shade, we might recall that it was on this date in 2013 that “The Shard” was officially opened. Designed by Renzo Piano, it is the tallest building the the U.K. (and until yesterday, was the tallest building in the E.U.).
“Friends share things”*…
Readers may recall that (R)D has contemplated black before [and here], more particularly, the emergence of the (then) “blackest black,” Vantablack. Here, via the always-amazing Imperica, an update:
I’ve featured Stuart Semple and his work in here quite a lot over the past few years; this is the latest in his gloriously petty (but also actually sort of serious) one-man project to annoy Anish Kapoor by creating a paint as-black as Kapoor’s famously VERY black Vantablack (if you want the background to the story you can read all about it [at the link below], but basically Semple thinks that Kapoor is a pompous, self-important arsehole and, by all accounts, Semple is absolutely 100% right). Anyway, if you want the chance to own some of the blackest paint EVER MADE, here’s your chance – the Kickstarter for it is 3x funded with over a month left to go, so this is definitely happening, and it’s worth backing it purely to have the chance to draw ACME-style Wil E Coyote-esque fake tunnels on walls all over London…
Semple says, “we’ve created a paint that absorbs 98-99% of visible light, we want to share this black hole in a bottle with all artists and creators.” Learn more– and but some of your own– at “The blackest black paint in the world! Black 3.0.”
* Pythagoras
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As we get dark, we might spare a thought for a man who did his best to dispel a different kind of darkness: René Descartes, the French philosopher and mathematician who thought and therefore was; he died on this date in 1650.
Many contemporaries (perhaps most notably, Pascal) rejected his famous conclusion, the dualist separation of mind and body; more (Voltaire, et al.), since. But Descartes’ emphasis on method and analysis, his disciplined integration of philosophy and physical science, his insistence on the importance of consciousness in epistemology, and perhaps most fundamentally, his the questioning of tradition and authority had a transformative– and lasting– effect on Western thought, and has earned him the “title” of Father of Modern Philosophy.
“In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn than to contemplate.”
– Rene Descartes
Frans Hals’ portrait of Descartes, c. 1649
“I see black light”*…
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio used ivory black to convey asceticism, piety, and inspiration in his 1605-6 painting, St Jerome Writing.
Suddenly, black was everywhere. It caked the flesh of miners and ironworkers; it streaked the walls and windows of industrial towns; it thickened the smoky air above. Proprietors donned black clothing to indicate their status and respectability. New black dyes and pigments created in factories and chemical laboratories entered painters’ studios, enabling a new expression for the new themes of the industrial age: factory work and revolt, technology and warfare, urbanity and pollution, and a rejection of the old status quo. A new class of citizen, later to be dubbed the “proletariat,” began to appear in illustrations under darkened smokestacks. The industrial revolution had found its color…
Black is technically an absence: the visual experience of a lack of light. A perfect black dye absorbs all of the light that impinges on it, leaving nothing behind. This ideal is remarkably difficult to manufacture. The industrialization of the 18th and 19th centuries made it easier, providing chemists and paint-makers with a growing palette of black—and altering the subjects that the color would come to represent. “These things are intimately connected,” says science writer Philip Ball, author of Bright Earth: The Invention of Color. The reinvention of black, in other words, went far beyond the color.
In the 20th century, a flood of new black paints would inspire a new set of artistic styles that took on modern subjects and themes. “Black was increasingly connected with industry, technology, and the urban environment,” says Erma Hermens, who leads the Technical Art History Group at the University of Glasgow. “Black becomes a statement.” Black also helped artists to delineate a new period in the history of art. “It was saying that the time of classical painting was past,” says Ball, “that we’re using modern materials in a modern way.”…
Black through the ages– as the means of creating the color black have changed, so have the subjects it represents: “The Reinvention of Black.”
(And looking forward, consider the implications of the newest technological revolution in creating black: vantablack.)
* Victor Hugo’s last words
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As we paint it black, we might send a finely-limned birthday card to Jacques-Louis David; he was born on this date in 1748. A master of cerebral “history painting, he is considered the preeminent artist of the French Neoclassical period. David had a great many pupils and followers, making him the strongest influence in French art of the early 19th century, especially on academic Salon painting.
The Death of Socrates (1787)
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