The Secret
Lives of Color – Kassia St. Clair (2017)
One of the greatest joys
of my life is my ability to see color. I
delight in experiencing the vast quantity of shades and hues available to me on
a daily basis. I live fascinated by
color. Colors can affect me in ways
nothing else can. With this in mind, I
found it most fortuitous to run into this great book by the columnist Kassia
St. Clair. It compiles and expands upon
her weekly color column, providing intriguing details concerning the discovery/creation
of individual colors, as well as describing the rise and fall of a given color’s
popularity.
Kassia St. Clair divides
her book into sections for each “color,” starting with Whites, Yellows and
Oranges, then Reds, Blues, Greens, etc., all the way to the various shades of “Black”
used by artists. Within each section,
she selects specific examples to focus on.
For instance, in the section on “Red,” St. Clair examines colors and color
sources such as Scarlet, Cochineal, Vermillion, and Hematite, and how each color
came into and out of fashion. Humans are
fickle beings, and we make up rules for everything, including color. During the European Medieval period, when
nearly every social and cultural decision was dictated by the rigidity and
stupidity of Roman Catholicism, colors such as Red were reserved for a very
select few, such as royalty or Bishops.
If you happened to be born into the so-called Lower Classes, your clothing
color choices were minimal, and ordered by law.
Poor people were forced to wear only drab, boring colors, such as brown,
tan and grey. This is as much a function
of societal control as any other law. To
keep the masses down and subjugated, one must trick them into thinking that
they are worthless, and what better way to do so that by requiring them to
dress in the colors of refuse. Every single color comes with such drama, and
the author well explores these human stupidities.
Another great aspect of
color is the many sources humans have discovered or invented to create
pigment. Ancient man used the basic
colors available to them. These include
the wide range of earth tones, reddish ones coming from hematite deposits,
brown ones from specific soils, and black from the soot and charcoal created by
campfires. Such colors are found in abundance
in Chauvet Cave, and other paleolithic art sites. As humans evolved, and proceeded to make
basic chemical discoveries (such as vinegar reacting with metal to form oxides),
new methods of color creation appeared.
One of the most widely-used colors was Lead White, created when sheets
of lead are oxidized in a vinegar bath.
The resulting white powder that forms on the outside of the Lead strips
is super white, opaque, color-fast, and worked with most binders without
unwanted chemical reactions. This caused
Lead White to become ubiquitous in paints, both for artists and for homes, and
for makeup and cosmetic applications. Many
rich and powerful ladies gave themselves lead poisoning because of the fashion
of the day, calling for the wealthy aristocrats to exhibit extremely pale
complexions, a sign of high-class, as the lowly people are tanned and brown from
outdoor menial labor. Color is, and has
always been, used to subjugate and divide us humans. The irony of the rich
killing themselves via their own standards of beauty while demeaning those who
cannot “afford” to the same is one of the many examples of the great Cosmic
Joke we all reside in.
The sources of color are
as varied as the hues themselves. Certain
reds come from the crushed bodies of tiny beetles. Some purples come from the tiny ink sacs of a
specific Mediterranean snail. Old artist
paints used brown pigments sourced from thousand-year-old mummies, and yellows extracted
from the urine of malnourished cows force-fed mango leaves. Other colors arise from plants and their
constituent parts, often through painstaking and difficult chemical
processes. It is a testament to the wit
and wisdom of humanity that our ancient ancestors discovered these colors and
how to create them. Even to this day,
the discovery of a new color can bring the discoverer untold riches, much as it
did in the past for those men who discovered cadmium pigments in their personal
chemical laboratories. In fact, the
color Mauve was discovered by accident by a researcher trying to synthesize
quinine, a treatment for malaria. To
think that ancient man did essentially the same with lead and copper, creating
pigments through chemistry, is awe-inspiring and humbling.
Colors affect us innately. They are used for wordless communication to
this day. Bright Reds and Yellows warn
us, cautioning in their intensity.
Greens represent Nature in all its wonder. Many cultures see Black as a symbol for mourning,
while others see White as the color of grief.
Our lives are suffused with colors, with new ones appearing every
day. If there is a lesson to be drawn
from Kassia St. Clair’s work it is that the emotional/intellectual weight of
colors is purely created by our human experience. There
is no universal definition of any color or its meaning. As with all things outside of our consciousness,
humans force meaning where it does not exist.
The lies we tell ourselves often end up oppressing our fellow man. Learning about the human connection to color
and pigment helps us fight the delusions, and should be required reading for any
artist. It may be that we all need to
understand that Life, and everything in Life, is but a process, a step forward among
a marathon of concurrent and disparate steps.
The old Zen koan concerning whether a tree falling in a wood makes a
sound if no one is there to hear it has always rung false. Sound exists independent of any receptor. It is solely the variant vibration within
air, water, or earth. Hence, sound exists
whether our ears receive it. I believe
the old koan was a way to force a student to understand how miniscule and
largely unimportant the human is to the workings of Mother Nature. Colors were not invented for the enjoyment of
us humans. Colors existed for billions
of years before Mother Earth spat out hominids, and will exist for trillions of
years after we have forced our own extinction.
Long live color!
(This book can be purchased here: https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Lives-Color-Kassia-Clair/dp/0143131141 )
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