Verwandte Artikel zu Color: A Natural History of the Palette

Color: A Natural History of the Palette - Softcover

Finlay, Victoria

 
9780812971422: Color: A Natural History of the Palette
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812971426 ISBN 13: 9780812971422
Verlag: Random House Trade, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

In this vivid and captivating journey through the colors of an artist’s palette, Victoria Finlay takes us on an enthralling adventure around the world and through the ages, illuminating how the colors we choose to value have determined the history of culture itself.

How did the most precious color blue travel all the way from remote lapis mines in Afghanistan to Michelangelo’s brush? What is the connection between brown paint and ancient Egyptian mummies? Why did Robin Hood wear Lincoln green? In Color, Finlay explores the physical materials that color our world, such as precious minerals and insect blood, as well as the social and political meanings that color has carried through time.

Roman emperors used to wear togas dyed with a purple color that was made from an odorous Lebanese shellfish–which probably meant their scent preceded them. In the eighteenth century, black dye was called logwood and grew along the Spanish Main. Some of the first indigo plantations were started in America, amazingly enough, by a seventeen-year-old girl named Eliza. And the popular van Gogh painting White Roses at Washington’s National Gallery had to be renamed after a researcher discovered that the flowers were originally done in a pink paint that had faded nearly a century ago. Color is full of extraordinary people, events, and anecdotes–painted all the more dazzling by Finlay’s engaging style.

Embark upon a thrilling adventure with this intrepid journalist as she travels on a donkey along ancient silk trade routes; with the Phoenicians sailing the Mediterranean in search of a special purple shell that garners wealth, sustenance, and prestige; with modern Chilean farmers breeding and bleeding insects for their viscous red blood. The colors that craft our world have never looked so bright.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

A British citizen living in Hong Kong, Victoria Finlay has worked for Reuters and was the arts editor for the South China Morning Post for four and a half years before leaving to write this book. She writes regularly about arts and travel for Hong Kong newspapers and international media.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Discover the tantalizing true stories behind your favorite colors.
For example: Cleopatra used saffron--a source of the color yellow--for seduction. Extracted from an Afghan mine, the blue "ultramarine" paint used by Michelangelo was so expensive he couldn't afford to buy it himself. Since ancient times, carmine red--still found in lipsticks and Cherry Coke today--has come from the blood of insects.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Ochre

"Art . . . must do something more than give pleasure: it

should relate to our own life so as to increase our

energy of spirit."

sir kenneth clark, Looking at Pictures1

In the lakelands of Italy there is a valley with ten thousand ancient rock carvings. These petroglyphs of Valle Camonica are signs that Neolithic people lived there once, telling stories and illustrating them with pictures. Some show strangely antlered beasts, too thin to provide much meat for a feast, and others show stick-people hunting them with stick-weapons. Another rock has a large five-thousand-year-old butterfly carved into it--although my visit coincided with that of a horde of German schoolchildren queuing up to trace it, and sadly I couldn't see the original through all the paper and wax crayons.

But in a quieter place, far away from the groups, I found a flat dark rock covered with fifty or more designs for two-story houses with pointy roofs. It didn't feel particularly sacred to me as I stood looking at it. It was more like an ancient real estate office or an architect's studio, or just a place where people sat and idly carved their domestic dreams. The crude carvings are not colored now, of course: any paints would have disappeared long ago in the Alpine rain. But as I sat there, contemplating the past, I saw what looked like a small stone on the ground. It was a different color from all the other mountain rubble--whatever it was, it didn't belong.

I picked it up and realized something wonderful. It didn't look promising: a dirty pale brown stub of claylike earth about the size and shape of a chicken's heart. On the front it was flat and on the back there were three planes like a slightly rounded three-sided pyramid. But when I placed the thumb and the first two fingers of my right hand over those three small planes, it felt immensely comfortable to hold. And what I realized then was that this piece of clay was in fact ochre, and had come from a very ancient paintbox indeed. I wet the top of it with saliva, and once the mud had come off it was a dark yellow color, the color of a haystack. When, copying the carvings, I drew a picture of a two-story house on the rock, the ochre painted smoothly with no grit: a perfect little piece of paint. It was extraordinary to think that the last person who drew with it--the person whose fingers had formed the grooves--lived and died some five thousand years ago. He or she had probably thrown this piece away after it had become too small for painting. A storm must have uncovered it, and left it for me to find.

Ochre--iron oxide--was the first color paint. It has been used on every inhabited continent since painting began, and it has been around ever since, on the palettes of almost every artist in history. In classical times the best of it came from the Black Sea city of Sinope, in the area that is now Turkey, and was so valuable that the paint was stamped with a special seal and was known as "sealed Sinope": later the words "sinopia" or "sinoper" became general terms for red ochre.2 The first white settlers in North America called the indigenous people "Red Indians" because of the way they painted themselves with ochre (as a shield against evil, symbolizing the good elements of the world,3 or as a protection against the cold in winter and insects in summer4), while in Swaziland's Bomvu Ridge (Bomvu means "red" in Zulu), archaeologists have discovered mines that were used at least forty thousand years ago to excavate red and yellow pigments for body painting.5 The word "ochre" comes from the Greek meaning "pale yellow," but somewhere along the way the word shifted to suggest something more robust--something redder or browner or earthier. Now it can be used loosely to refer to almost any natural earthy pigment, although it most accurately describes earth that contains a measure of hematite, or iron ore.

There are big ochre mines in the Luberon in southern France and even more famous deposits in Siena in Tuscany: I like to think of my little stub of paint being brought from that area by Neolithic merchants, busily trading paint-stones for furs from the mountains. Cennino Cennini wrote of finding ochre in Tuscany when he was a boy walking with his father. "And upon reaching a little valley, a very wild steep place, scraping the steep with a spade, I beheld seams of many kinds of color," he wrote. He found yellow, red, blue and white earth, "and these colors showed up in this earth just the way a wrinkle shows in the face of a man or a woman."

I knew there would be stories to be uncovered in many ochre places--from Siena to Newfoundland to Japan. But for my travels in search of this first colored paint I wanted to go to Australia--because there I would find the longest continuous painting tradition in the world. If I had been charmed by my five-thousand-year-old ochre, how much more charmed would I be in Australia where cave painters used this paint more than forty thousand years ago? But I also knew that in the very center of Australia I would find the story of how that ancient painting tradition was transformed to become one of the most exciting new art movements in recent years.

Before I left for Australia I called an anthropologist friend in Sydney, who has worked with Aboriginal communities for many years. At the end of our phone conversation I looked at the notes I had scribbled. Here they are:

* It'll take time. Lots.

* Ochre is still traded, even now.

* Red is Men's Business. Be careful.

I had absentmindedly underlined the last point several times. It seemed that the most common paint on earth was also sometimes the most secret. Finding out about ochre was going to be a little more complicated than I had thought.

SYDNEY

Hetty Perkins, one of the Aboriginal curators at the Gallery of New South Wales, described the secrecy of indigenous traditions most vividly, as we drank coffee in the gallery garden after the opening of a major retrospective of Aboriginal art that she had organized.6 "This is a blanket," she said, putting her hand on a piece of white paper in my notebook, "and this is Australia," she continued, touching the wooden table. "You lift the paper, and it's all underneath . . . Many paintings are like the blanket . . . we don't understand the full extent of the meanings, but we know that they mean country." I was intrigued to know whether she had peeked underneath--at the table, so to speak. "It's not my privilege," she said. "That's why I'm careful. It's not my place to ask anyone what anything means. That will come later on."

So, effectively--I summarized for myself that evening--I was going to look for a pigment that in one of its incarnations I wasn't allowed to see, and which was used to paint secrets I wasn't allowed to know. And I respected that secrecy. But what then, under those rather rigorous conditions, would I find in the north and then the center of Australia to help me understand the appeal of ochre?

DARWIN

What I discovered was ochre itself. I found it immediately and I found miles of it. I had not quite appreciated how the Top End of Australia is a quarry of ochres--there is so much of it that people use it commercially for colored concrete. On my first morning in Darwin I went for an early morning walk along East Point beach, which is famous locally for its colors. The rocks were like raspberry ripple ice cream, as if some lazy Ancestral Being had been given the job of mixing up the yellow, white, orange and red ingredients into the brown color of proper cliffs but had been distracted by a passing possum and ended up leaving them to dry in unmixed swirls of color. The crimson hematite was splashed like spilt blood over the whiter rocks. When I ground the loose pebbles on the mortar of the rock, and added a drop of seawater, I found I could paint with...

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Verlag
Random House Trade
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812971426
ISBN 13 
9780812971422
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
464
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchbär
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