Colors II
If you ask me about colors, three fragments from a decade ago pop into my mind immediately: a memorable Radiolab episode, a delightful NPR web-app, and Eminem rhyming with “orange.”
I’m adding a fourth case to my instant list. It’s about a gray-green color called celadon.
The name originated as a character in L’Astrée, a French novel that spans more than 5,000 pages and was published in the early 1600s. Céladon cloaked himself in a particular tone of green that matched ceramic glazes produced in China and Korea since the 900s.
Colors (or their absence) create the world we know, but the stories we associate with any shade or tint elevate colors into our memories, far beyond the backdrop of our daily existences.
For instance, the designers of the Space Needle could have left Seattle with a benign palette of dark green, gold, white, and red.
No, no.
The official colors of the structure are Orbital Olive, Galaxy Gold, Astronaut White, and Re-entry Red.
Adding cultural context to our visual definitions is not a new habit, either. People assembled catalogs to differentiate and standardize color names, with two prominent books appearing in the late 1600s and the early 1800s, recreated into striking displays (1) and (2) by data artist Nicholas Rougeux. Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, in the 1800s, used examples from animals, plants, and minerals to match a named color to its real-world equivalent.
On a scientific level, what our eyes / brains register as Werner’s Broccoli Brown is the wavelengths of light that an object reflects while all other wavelengths are absorbed. So in some ways, what we see is exactly what an object is not. Color quickly shifts from simple descriptions to metaphysical quandaries.
The archives are filled with stories of the gritty, dangerous processes of trying to synthesize what nature produces by design, but technology has expanded the possible color boundaries to the edge of antiseptic: the blackest black, the whitest white, and a teal you can only see in a laboratory.
Out of the lab, you can pinpoint any pixel on any webpage to find the hex code of that color — incredibly useful and better than lead or arsenic leaching toxins in every paint tube! But the abundance of modern precision has left me yearning for the analog tactility of the collages of Eric Carle, the screenprints of Corita Kent, and the letterpress work of Hatch Show Print. Still vivid and beautiful, but not as slick and impersonal.
That balance is true for every second of this “Optical Poem” from 1938 (several years before the famed Fantasia).
—
This newsletter was written on the traditional lands of the Piscataway and Nacotchtank.