In Living Color: A Prismatic Reading List on Pigment, Paint, and Perception
October 15, 2024 at 03:30PM
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March 1832. Aboard the HMS Beagle in fair weather, Charles Darwin consulted a small guidebook from his pocket. “I had been struck by the beautiful colour of the sea when seen through the chinks of a straw hat,” he wrote in his zoological notebook. “Indigo with a little Azure blue,” he noted the color of the sea, and “Berlin with little Ultra marine,” the color of the sky, “with some cirro cumili scattered about.” A blue day.
Over a billion years ago, some cyanobacteria got busy making pink pigment, and life on earth has been shot through with color since. As humans, we evolved to see color. But in chasing its allure, we have gone overboard as usual. Whole bodies of knowledge exist about how we see colors (via physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, neuroscience); how we name and feel about them (via history, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, culture); how we make and play with them (via chemistry, art, literature, film, photography, fashion, food); even how we make money with them (via advertising, economics). We have become inextricably bound to color—and colors—in a complex, lifelong relationship.
I’m from India. Here we are drenched in color from head to toe. We have a complicated history with it. We think in color. We dream in color. We live in color. And in spring, we have Holi, a whole festival of colors, where we douse each other with colored powder and water. The very air turns varicolored.
“I hear the question upon your lips: What is it to be a color? Color is the touch of the eye, music to the deaf, a word out of the darkness,” says Red in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red. Within the color’s earshot, a miniaturist gone blind from years of work asks another, “My dear master, explain red to somebody who has never known red.” The other says, braiding memory and the senses, “If we touched it with the tip of a finger, it would feel like something between iron and copper. If we took it into our palm, it would burn. If we tasted it, it would be full-bodied, like salted meat. If we took it between our lips, it would fill our mouths. If we smelled it, it would have the scent of a horse. If it were a flower, it would smell like a daisy, not a red rose.”
At my writing desk, I run my finger along the tiny glass vials into which I have decanted a dozen oils and potions—root and bark, leaf and flower, fruit and seed—just so I can look at them in the light. I shall make beetroot for lunch, I think, and wash drawing paper in the purple juice. Or perhaps tip a generous green palette into white—bruise spinach with green chilies and curry leaves in coconut oil; crush raw mango with coconut for a chutney; dust some basmati in powder of moringa. “To work magic, to put enchantments upon others, one has first to put enchantments on oneself,” writes Indologist and art historian Heinrich Zimmer. I must color myself so I can soak you in some.
Treasures from the Color Archive (Simon Schama, The New Yorker, August 2018)
The Public Domain Review takes us on a concise tour of Colour Wheels, Charts, and Tables Through History, and Nicholas Rougeux presents his wonderful recreations of Boogert’s (1692), Goethe’s (1810), and Werner’s (1821) colors.
Humans are besotted with color and we always have been. We love it so much we will breathe it, eat it, drink it, and look at it until our eyes roll back in our heads. We will paint with it, paint the world with it, paint ourselves with it. We will go to the ends of the earth to get it; we will give all the jewels in the land for it; we will live for it and we will die for it.
Here are the historic pigments of the Forbes Collection at Harvard—a testament to our centuries-old infatuation. Schama dives in at the deep end.
To get to the truth of the matter, Joseph Hooker, the director of Kew Gardens, sent T. N. Mukharji, an expert in the materials of Indian arts, to the village of Mirzapur, in the Bihar region. There, as Mukharji wrote in an account published in 1883, he discovered a sect of gwalas, or milkmen, who fed their cattle mango leaves; the cattle’s urine, when evaporated in earthenware pots set over a fire and then baked in the sun, produced the precious yellow powder. Cows are sacred in Hindu culture, and the ones Mukharji had seen were, he wrote, “very unhealthy.” Mukharji’s account apparently led the British-Indian government in Bengal to ban production of the pigment at the turn of the century. Doubts about Mukharji’s story remain. Victoria Finlay, the author of “Color: A Natural History of the Palette,” found no record of the pigment’s ban in the archives, nor did she find, when she travelled to Mirzapur around 2002, any local memory of cows being fed on mango leaves. Was this yet another fable in the great treasury of color lore? In her book, Finlay writes, “When I think of Indian Yellow, I will always wonder whether the explanation that I have heard is reality or merely a reflection of reality, and whether this story is simply an example of somebody gently, and literally, taking the piss.”
Hue’s Hue Archives (Katy Kelleher, The Paris Review, February 2018–November 2020)
Cabinet Magazine, an art and culture publication, invites writers to respond to specific colors assigned by the editors. And the writers are exuberant in their response.
If you worry that most writing on color fails to capture the essential feeling of color, the delights and devilries of it, worry no more. Kelleher comes to revive you with refreshing juice, an amazing patchwork quilt, a veritable sprawl of gorgeous color. These pieces work because this is how we experience color, alive and all around us, entering our myths and lore and lives, binding us intimately to the world. This lavishly illustrated column offers: Verdigris; Russet; Periwinkle; Mustard; Flower (Yellows); Living Coral; Chartreuse; Blaze Orange; Hooker’s Green; Lilac; Scheele’s Green; Jonquil; Incarnadine; Marian Blue; Eau de Nil. There are more on her Color Stories Substack—Fulvous; Celeste; Oxblood; Heliotrope; Blue Raspberry; Sage; Cinnabar; Dove Gray; Spring Green; Bastard Amber.
Blue was elusive, and this made it valuable. The earliest stable blue was made from lapis lazuli, the mining of which began in Afghanistan around six thousand years ago. Egyptians loved this bold cobalt blue and would pulverize lapis lazuli stones and mix the resulting powder with animal fat or vegetable gum to create a thick blue paste, which they used to adorn the dead bodies of royalty. (Lapis lazuli was used for the inlaid eyebrows and kohl on Tutankhamen’s funeral mask. The living wore blue too: Cleopatra reportedly wore on her eyelids to a brilliant and sparkling effect a fine dust made of lapis lazuli, which, I imagine, was nothing like the wan powdery-blue eye shadows so popular in the 1980s.) For millennia, blue has been a sacred and costly hue, more valuable even than gold. And in the Christian world, the most valuable color was reserved for the most elevated of virgins. Enter Marian blue.
Why It Took Us Thousands of Years to See the Colour Violet (Allen Tager, Psyche, June 2021)
Have you considered exploring artworks by color? Google Arts & Culture Color Explorer lets you do just that. For instance, explore paintings that lead with green.
A color isn’t there, and suddenly, it’s everywhere. What could be behind this phenomenon? When Tager wonders, it’s not an idle wonderment. Over 20 years, he visits 193 museums in 42 countries. Armed with 1,500 Munsell color chips, he examines 139,892 works of art. He figures that the tide turned violet around the 1860s and then the Impressionists, violettomaniacs all, just couldn’t get enough of it. But why was violet missing before? Did the color fade? Were the pigments too expensive? Did artists only have an incomplete grasp of color theory? Or could it be that our retinae evolved to adapt to the changed light that now reached them?
One theory comes from the American astrobiologist Adrian Melott at the University of Kansas, who has suggested that cosmic rays produced by supernovae can alter ionisation of the atmosphere, resulting in showers of subatomic particles called muons; the muons in turn might induce genetic mutations in Earth’s inhabitants, including us. Low levels of ionising radiation can cause biological molecules to mutate slightly, which can promote genetic variation. This fosters small and gradual changes in living things, allowing them to develop better survival traits and adapt to their changing environments. Our planet is still ploughing through the debris of ancient supernovae, and I can’t help but wonder whether a muon shower might have enhanced our ability to see violet midway through the 19th century on Earth.
Do You See What I See? (Nicola Jones, Sapiens, February 2017)
In the Netflix docuseries Life in Color, the inimitable Sir David Attenborough examines how animals use color to “survive and thrive in the wild.” Time well spent.
The sea is blue. The sea was never blue. We see the sky bluely. Is my blue your blue? Is it grue, though? The colors we see change based on evolution, our genes, our age, our brains, our eyes, the nature and wavelength of light, the seasons, the languages we speak, the cultures we are born into and raised in, the proximity of other colors, the way we observe, and even the high-stakes decisions of the color industry. But is there perhaps some underlying universal quality to the way we perceive them? Jones investigates. There are two camps that argue with each other, and vociferously so. The “universalists” say yes, all peoples see and name colors in a similar way. The “relativists,” on the other hand, say there is a spectrum. Does the truth lie somewhere in the middle?
In a Candoshi village in the heart of Peru, anthropologist Alexandre Surrallés puts a small colored chip on a table and asks, “Ini tamaara?” (“How is it?” or “What is it like?”). What Surrallés would like to ask is, “What color is this?” But the Candoshi, a tribe of some 3,000 people living on the upper banks of the Amazon River, don’t have a word for the concept of color. Nor are their answers to the question he does ask familiar to most Westerners. In this instance, a lively discussion erupts between two Candoshi about whether the chip, which Surrallés would call amber or yellow-orange, looks more like ginger or fish spawn.
What It’s Like to See 100 Million Colors (Interview with Concetta Antico, Alexa Tsoulis Reay, The Cut, February 2015)
There have been many film color processes, but Technicolor changed storytelling. In the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy steps into Technicolor. As do we.
In The Island of the Colorblind, the chronicle of his journey to a tiny Micronesian coral atoll called Pingelap, beloved neurologist Oliver Sacks writes about its isolated community of congenital achromats—those who are born completely colorblind. But their gray world is rich in attributes that might otherwise pale in our trichromatic, million-color world. At the other extreme, inhabiting an entirely different world, are tetrachromats—women who, with a mutation of the X chromosome and an extra cone receptor in their retinae, can see a hundred times more color and color within color. Here’s Concetta Antico—loving blueberries, dressing like a peacock, avoiding horror movies—and (most) everything you wanted to know about being a tetrachromat but were afraid to ask. After all that buildup, her paintings turn out to be a bit meh. But even if she, Nuñez-like, painted a tetrachromatic magic world, how could we ever tell?
I was interested in impressionists and post-impressionists, and I started reproducing Cézannes when I was about 7 or 8. I studied the masters using old Reader’s Digests. But I’d also copy the covers of my favorite record albums by bands like Yes or Status Quo. I often tell a story about a time in preschool when I painted a big old wooden fence with water. I was captivated because I could see so many colors in the liquid. It was like I was painting rainbows.
I love blueberries. The color of the skin is so varied. Blues, purples, grays, gold, magentas, azures, and then when you bite them you get every type of gray, yellow, green, gold, lime, pink, violet. These are some of my favorite colors. I stare at them so much when I eat them: at the skin and the surprise colors inside.
A Circus of the Senses (Shruti Ravindran, Aeon, January 2015)
What if you could hear color? This Google Arts & Culture machine learning experiment attempts to find out. The Russian abstract painter and synesthete Vasily Kandinsky heard the colors of his Yellow-Red-Blue as he painted. And now you can, too. Here’s how it works.
“The confessions of a synesthete must sound tedious and pretentious to those who are protected from such leakings and drafts by more solid walls than mine are,” says Vladimir Nabokov in his autobiography Speak, Memory. But science has now come to the aid of those wired for maximum delight. With a recorded history of over 200 years and known the world over way longer (soberly and trippily), synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon where the senses meld and flow together in many different ways, altering perception, making unusual conceptual leaps and associations, creating an altogether enhanced reality. A color synesthete—and there are many kinds—sees color flow, emanate, explode from letters and numbers, music, scents, even food. But could it be that everyone is a “closet synesthete”—filling in for sensory deficits, understanding metaphor and poetry, perceiving all things all at once all the time? Ravindran follows a curious trail.
In 1818, this [Rousseau’s 1762] idea inspired Mary Shelley’s description of the early sensory experience of another strange newborn. ‘A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me,’ says the monster in her novel Frankenstein, ‘and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt, at the same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses.’
These studies and others have led Maurer to conclude that the hyper-connected neural networks observed in babies tapered down over time, or got ‘pruned’ by their environment and their experience. She reckoned that the pruning had the effect of fading out the attendant psychedelic phenomena – except among synaesthetes, in whose brains the thicket of connections got strengthened and reinforced.
Kanya Kanchana is a poet and philologist from India.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/10/15/in-living-color-a-prismatic-reading-list-on-pigment-paint-and-perception/
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