Posts Tagged ‘color’
“It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood”*…
Back in 2011, on his blog devoted to all things Mister Rogers, neighborhoodarchive.com, Tim Lybarger recorded the color of every sweater Rogers wore in each episode between 1979 and 2001. “When I realized such a resource didn’t exist… I just felt like somebody needed to do it…might as well be me.”…
Dive more deeply into the sartorial habits of a true American hero at “Every Color Of Cardigan Mister Rogers Wore From 1979–2001.”
* Fred Rogers (the first line of the lyrics of his theme song for his series, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood)
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As we agree to be his neighbor, we might recall that it was on this date in 1990 that Americans were invited into a very different kind of neighborhood: NBC premiered Seinfeld. (In fact, the pilot– with a different title [The Seinfeld Chronicles] and a different female lead [“Claire the waitress” instead of Elaine]– was broadcast in July of 1989; but NBC didn’t pick up the series until the following year.)
“All photographs are memento mori”*…
Tropical Street: tourists walking past shops and restaurants in a tropical setting, Hawaii, USA
Many, many more glances at yesteryear at “Vintage Stock Photos“– all free.
* Susan Sontag
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As we check those photos in our wallets, we might spare a thought for Eliot Porter; he died on this date in 1990. An American photographer, he is best known for his color photographs of nature. With encouragement from Alfred Stieglitz and Ansel Adams, Porter turned an adolescent hobby into his profession.
Porter was the first established artist-photographer to commit to exploring the beauty and diversity of the natural world in color photographs. Over much of his career, black-and-white photography set the artistic standard, and he had to fight his colleagues’ prejudices against the medium. But in 1962 the Sierra Club published “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World.” That immensely popular book, combining his evocative color photographs of New England woods with excerpts from the writings of Henry David Thoreau, revolutionized photographic book publishing, and legitimized color. Its success set Porter on a lifelong path of creating similar photographic portraits of a wide variety of ecologically significant locations the world over.
“You cannot get a grip on blue… blue is sly, slick, it slides into the room sideways, a slippery trickster”*…
Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, ca. 1665
Michelangelo couldn’t afford ultramarine. His painting The Entombment, the story goes, was left unfinished as the result of his failure to procure the prized pigment. Rafael reserved ultramarine for his final coat, preferring for his base layers a common azurite; Vermeer was less parsimonious in his application and proceeded to mire his family in debt. Ultramarine: the quality of the shade is embodied in its name. This is the superlative blue, the end-all blue, the blue to which all other hues quietly aspire. The name means “beyond the sea”—a dreamy ode to its distant origins, as romantic as it is imprecise…
The whole fascinating story at “True Blue- a brief history of ultramarine.”
* Christopher Moore, Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d’Art
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As we dip our brushes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1886 that a gift from France was formally received in the U.S.: it was on this date that year that “Liberty Enlightening the World”– a token of friendship from the French to the U.S. better known as the Statue of Liberty– was dedicated by President Grover Cleveland.
Designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, a French sculptor, it was built by Gustave Eiffel (his Eiffel Tower served as the statue’s armature), who had it shipped from France encased in more than 200 crates, then reassembled it and placed on its pedestal on (what was then known as) Bedloe’s Island, where Cleveland took her in.
“The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most”*…
A hand-colored explosion from INVENTOR CRAZYBRAINS AND HIS WONDERFUL AIRSHIP (1906)
At the turn of the 20th century, a color revolution was sweeping across Europe and North America. The invention decades earlier of aniline dyes, synthesized from coal tar, had made pigments cheap and colorfast, fueling an explosion of brilliantly hued goods. Tinted stage lights and hand-dyed “magic lantern” projector slides illuminated vaudeville performances, variety shows, and traveling fairs. Vibrant clothes and dye-printed advertising posters emblazoned city streets. Vivid wallpapers, photographs, and trade postcards decorated the walls of homes while color-printed illustrations adorned women’s journals, children’s books, and dime-novel covers. Suddenly, the world looked like a fantastic, varicolored dream.
Out of this chromatic fantasia emerged the first colored motion pictures. Decades before the Technicolor wonders of The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Gone with the Wind (1939), filmmakers experimented with a variety of techniques for dyeing 35mm black-and-white prints. Colorists, primarily women, learned to paint these silent films with delicate brushstrokes, meticulously carved stencils, and chemical baths that washed entire scenes in icy blues, resplendent greens, or fiery reds.
These innovations mark a technical highpoint in filmmaking. This was the moment when the gray shadows of the silent screen burst to life with the wondrous and shocking vivacity of color…
More on the silent screen’s explosion into color– with glorious examples like the one above– at “The Phantasmagoria of the First Hand-Painted Films.”
* John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice
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As we peer through rose-colored glasses, we might recall that it was on this date in 2000 that John Travolta’s passion project, the feature film Battlefield Earth, was released. Based on (the first half of) Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s novel of the same name, it was an epic failure, both at the box office and with critics, and was nominated for nine Golden Raspberry Awards (a record, until 2012).
It has, of course, become a cult film…
“The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most”*…
For Lapham’s Quarterly‘s fashion issue, designer Haisam Hussein reinvents the color wheel to show where various shades of colors were invented—from Int’l Klein Blue (Paris) to Scheele’s Green (Sweden), Turmeric (India), and Mauve (London).
Alongside the graphic itself are the origin stories for each color, which, as we’ve seen before, can be less than appetizing. White Lead, for instance, was created in Japan circa the year 700 by exposing lead sheets to vinegar and fermenting horse manure—then used by the elite class as face powder. Tyrian purple is derived from the secretions of sea snails, and Orchil (Florence) dye is made from dried and ground lichen that is activated with ammonia, such as that from urine.
[via]
Explore here.
And on a related note: “Pantone: How the world authority on color became a pop culture icon.”
* John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice
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As we tackle tints, we might spare a thought for Alexander Calder; he died on this date in 1976. A sculptor known for monumental stationary works called stabiles, he is also considered the father of the mobile (a type of moving sculpture made with delicately balanced or suspended shapes that respond to touch or air currents).
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