Color by Victoria Findlay

6th November, 2009 4 Comments

For an art student, I was pretty bad.  I fell asleep in the art-history lectures,* wasn’t particularly creative, nor was I obsessive enough to want to be drawing constantly.  I was simply a decent-ish artist.  After graduation I pretty much stopped drawing and painting with the exception of a few rare instances.

Recently, I decided that I’d like to get back in touch with the things I used to enjoy doing but have not had much time for in the past decade. You’ve already seen pictures of AWESOME! 1–better known as The Gnat Rocket I built (AWESOMER!! 1 is currently being prepped for painting). Five weeks ago, I enrolled in a watercolor class, the medium being one I was not particularly knowledgeable about.  Most of the classes have covered general painting concepts that I’m well versed in:  color theory, values and dimension, lighting, etc. I’ve painted lots of pears. LOTS of pears.

During the color theory class, where I made yet another color wheel, the instructor waxed poetic about colors and how wonderful they are. I asked her if she’d ever read Victoria Findlay’s book Color:  A Natural History of the Palette and offered to lend her my copy.  The book had come into my possession after calling out to me repeatedly for a year from a table in Posman Books while I waited for trains to take me upstate. Finally, I cracked and proceeded to devour the book. I’m pretty sure it had to do with the simple title and the vibrant but not overwhelming colors of the cover.

As I told Joan during our most recent class (she too is devouring the book), I want to be Findlay.  Whether she was able to do this with an advance or not, I don’t care.  How cool is it that she got to travel the world learning about how ancient dyes were made?  Mexico to learn about cochenille (ugly sucker) or sneaking into Afghanistan during a tumultuous time to visit aquamarine mines that helped to create the Renaissance blues for the Virgin Mary’s veils.

Part travel-log, part natural science, part history and analysis of culture.  The book takes you through the rainbow, starting with ochre in Australia and Aboriginal paintings, to Spain where you learn about saffron and over to India for indigo.  The chapter on learning about the lost art of Phoenician dyeing, on our never knowing exactly what shade of purple was associated with royalty, was by far my favorite. Most likely the purple came from mollusks and a form of the color can be found by way of sea snails, a technique still used in parts of Mexico.

The book was fascinating precisely because it blended so many different genres into one.  It’s been a few years since I read it myself, having lent it out to numerous people.  Color is an engaging history of something we take for granted, how we discover what natural materials will create dyes and how that influenced various societies over time.  Once the I’ve finished my attempt at 100 books this year (14 more to go!), this might be one of the first I pick up to re-read.

*Before my mother yells at me about wasting my education, I would like to point out that I minored in art and don’t even use my major in advertising.  The class was in a stuffy lecture hall and somehow I got stuck–not in the art student art-history class–but rather in the “art-history” elective for non-art students.  “These are the pyramids, notice the triangular shape.”–I passed with an A and got to catch-up on much needed sleep.

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