4.8.25

Kassia St. Clair Explores the History, Sources, and Meanings of Color

 


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 )

No comments:

Post a Comment

Any Thoughts?