Day 12

Quote from Vincent Van Gogh, The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh

I should like to paint the portrait of an artist friend, a man who dreams great dreams, who works as the nightingale sings, because it is his nature. He’ll be a blond man. I want to put my appreciation, the love I have for him into the picture. So I paint him as he is, as faithfully as I can, to begin with.
But the picture is not yet finished. To finish it I am now going to be an arbitrary colorist. I exaggerate the fairness of the hair, I even get to orange tones, chromes and pale citron-yellow.
Behind the head, instead of painting the ordinary wall of the mean room, I paint infinity, a plain background of the richest, intensest blue that I can contrive, and by this simple combination of the bright head against the rich blue background, I get a mysterious effect, like a star in the depths of an azure sky.

Nietzche, The Color Blindness of Thinkers

All accounts, their very great painters portrayed their world only with black red and yellow – ow different and how much closer to men their nature must have appeared, seeing that to their eyes the colors of men were also predominant in nature and that the latter swam, so to speak, in the atmosphere of human colors (Light blue and green dehumanize nature more than any other color.)

Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, Methods and Materials of Painting of the Great Schools and Masters

The colorists of all schools treat the deepest shades as intense and, more or less, transparent browns. This brown could undoubtedly be produced by glazing over a not too dark grey; but such a system could express no force of light and shade, and in Rubens’ case, although the ground was often a light grey, the dark brown was inserted at first in its deepest power. There is, therefore, in this respect, no essential difference between the Italian and the Flemish practice; intense brown, no matter how produced, is common to all the colorists in dark shadows.
The skill of Titan was particularly shown in distinguishing objects that apparently differ but slightly in color by exaggerating the characteristic hues to which they respectively tend, and by suppressing their common qualities. Thus Mengs and Fuser justly observe that he took the predominant quality in a color for the only quality, by painting flesh which abounded n ruddy or warm tints entirely in such tints, and by depriving of all such tints a carnation which was inclined to paleness.

Day 11

Concerning color film, “white” or normal daylight is defined as a mixture of direct sunlight and of light reflected by a few white clouds in an otherwise bright blue sky, when the sun is at an angle of more than 20 degrees to the horizon. The only other type of light that can be considered “white” is the light of a veil of high and difused vapors, dense enough to hide the sun.

Andreas Feininger, Color Photography

Do not roll out the carpets, do not make my path envied. The gods wish to be honored thus. That a mortal may set foot upon such beauty of color is not without dismay to me. As a man you must honor me, not as God.

Aeschylus, Agamemmon

Madame Hinglow let the armchair adapt to her shapely curves…Through her almost transparent dress could be glimpsed the tattoos on her belly. . . according to the fashion of the day. . .

D.N. Shukla, Hindu Canons of Iconography and Painting

As far as physics is concerned colors do not exist, but only monochromatic lights. Only those found within the limits of the visible spectrum, between 4000 and 7600 A, are of interest to the physiologist. Every monochromatic light is characterized by a wavelength () and by a frequency (v); and hence by a given energy (hv) of corresponding photons. The different refrangibility of these lights allowed Newton to recognize that solar radiations can be broken down into numerous monochromatic lights which give a sensation of white when they strike the retina together.
The sensation of color arises when a monochromatic light or a mixture of two or more monochromatic lights strikes the retina. The word color is therefore a physiological term, which presupposes the capacity of the retina to respond with different messages to different monochromatic lights or mixtures of them…A normal human eye can distinguish about 160 colors, which means that it can respond to different monochromatic lights by sending 160 different messages to the center.

Giuseppe Moruzzi, Fisiologio della Vita di Relazione

Day 8

More Quotes on Color from various artists:

It Is So Stiflingly Hot.

It is dawn and a woman is lying in bed… She is covered up to her head with a light mauve robe that has a lining of dark violet; the color of both the outside and the lining is fresh and glossy. The woman, who appears to be asleep, wears an unlined orange robe and a dark crimson skirt of stiff silk whose cords hang loosely by her side, as if they have been left untied. Her thick tresses tumble over each other in cascades, and one can imagine how long her hair must be when it falls freely down her back.

Elegant Things

A white coat worn over a violet waistcoat. A rosary of rock crystal. Wisteria blossoms. Plum blossoms covered with snow. A pretty child eating strawberries.

Unsuitable Things

A woman with ugly hair wearing a robe of white damask. Holleyhock worn in frizzled hair. Ugly handwriting on red paper. A woman of the lower classes dressed in a scarlet trouser-skirt. The sight is all too common these days. (Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book)

Colors, in which every century and nation takes delight, show the customs of the latter. And today everybody loves black, a sign precisely of earth, matter and hell, of mourning and ignorance. Since the first color was celestial pale blue…then red in its war like cruelty; then came white in the time of Jesus God, and all the baptized wore white garments, and from there by various colors we have now arrived at black. And so, white will return, according to the fatal wheel. (Tommaso Campanella, Sopra I Colori delle Vesti)

What, then, is the cause of colors in nature? None other than the disposition of bodies to reflect the rays of a certain order and to absorb all the others… And how does this reflection occur? It was thought that it was due to the rebounding of rays, as of a ball, on the surface of a solid body. Not at all: Newton teaches the astonished philosophers that bodies are opaque due only to the wideness of their pores; that light is reflected in our eyes from inside these same pore; that the smaller the pores of a body are the more transparent the body will be…(Voltaire, Lettres Philosophiques)

According to legend, Hermes Trismegistus, the Thrice Greatest, Master of All Arts and Sciences, founded the art of healing-and just about every branch of learning that interested mankind. The famous Emerald Tablet, said to have been found in the valley of Ebron, in a sense summarized the teachings of the fabulous Egyptian. It contained an alchemical formula and involved color because color was part of alchemy and in turn obedient to one supreme and divine entity associated with light. Hermes unquestionably tried to heal with color. One papyrus exclaims, “Come verdigris ointment! Come then verdant one!” (Faber Birren, Color in Your World)

In Egypt colors were considered to be signs indicating the “essence of things and not their appearance,” as witnessed by the Egyptian word for “Color,” which also meant “to be”. According to this thought colors had been separated from the divine body at the time of Creation and had been assigned to every population, to every animal, plant or mineral, to distinguish their peculiarities. Hieroglyphic writing was entrusted to two types of inks: one black, with a positive value, and one red, with a negative value, reserved for corrections or to the writing of names referring to negative entities or facts; at times the hieroglyphs were engraved in the stone and painted in colored glazes or filled with insertions of precious stones or glass pastes, in which every color exalted and reinforced the value of their meaning. (Lia Luzzato and Renata Pompas, Il Significato dei Colori nelle Civilta’ Antiche)

Colors continued

The world was made of animals, mountains, butterflies, birds, clouds, lakes, mushrooms, stones, flowers: everything had its color and was distinguished by its color, everything was what it was, with its color attached. For me at that time no color existed that was not “attached” to some object or animal or vegetal thing, no such color existed in my catalog of perceptions, discoveries and notions, no “detached” or abstract color existed for me: it didn’t exist then and as far as I’m concerned, if I really must tell the truth, no color “Detached” from an event, be it natural or even artificial, exists now either.
So as I say, “detached” color, classified color or “scientific” color doesn’t exist even now as far as I’m concerned. In my life it seems to me that in general very few classified things actually exists, very few “Pantones”, very little that is “scientific” really exists, to the extent that if I were to discover a “scientific” zone I wouldn’t really know how to think of it, how to talk about it, I wouldn’t even know much what to do with it, though I know well that the “scientific” zone is very useful, most of all it feeds engineers and everybody needs engineers, we know that, probably I need them too, but I don’t know it or I forget about it or perhaps I’ve got other things to think about. Although I do feel increasingly surrounded by scientific, or rather by engineered zones because the world is more and more full of engineers, some of them good, a lot of them not, others rhetorical, others smug half-wits, I go on living in the middle of forests that I know less and less about and only sometimes, seldom, do I manage to walk through fields in spring, on colored fields, where – as if by a divine blessing – I find myself not wishing and not even needing to know anything about what existence is.
This perhaps is another story…

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