'On the materiality of colour'

Here are some images relating to Materiality of Colour: from Neolithic Earth Colours to Contemporary Interference Pigments, a seminar convened by Antoni Malinowski.

This is pigment timeline discussed by Jo Volley and colleagues from UCL (see note [1])

Here is an image that uses Indian Yellow, one of the pigments discussed by Ruth Siddall. Traditionally, this was made from the boiled urine of cattle fed exclusively on mango tree leaves.

This is the colour library in Venice, described by Malinowski as one of his favourite places

And this is from a Color-coordinate system from a 13th-century account of rainbows by Hannah Smithson et al. [2]

Notes

[1] I have turned the image upside down so that the present time is at the top and the lower down you go the further back in time you go. This is to reflect an idea, expressed at the seminar, that the pigments 'arise from the earth'

[2]  Historical European models of the spectrum can be found here or here

'Colour is a way of seeing things'

Color is a mode of interpreting information, and sometimes it tells us more than pigment. It can tell us about motion: a black-and-white wheel set spinning reveals the rainbow. It can tell us about depth: Long distances appear blue because higher wavelength red light scatters less. “Color is not an object of sight but a way of seeing things,” writes Mazviita Chirimuuta. [1]

Does color even exist? by Malcolm Harris.

Perception belongs not to optics but to the study of the wonderful.

Johannes Kepler


Note [1] but colour reveals the shape of space and time in the universe.

Image: alphacoders.com

A physical impossibility

White light contains a mixture of all wavelengths in the visible spectrum. It is the dirtiest, muddiest color possible. But the visual system does not model it in that way. Instead, the visual system encodes the information of high brightness and low color. That is the brain’s model of white light— a high value of brightness and a low value of color, a purity of luminance— a physical impossibility.

Consciousness and the Social Brain by Michael Graziano

Image from here

Living colour

Our eyes can distinguish between wavelengths that differ by just one nanometer, but only in the green section of the colour palette: human vision can simultaneously detect about fifty different shades of green

The daytime sky is actually violet but our retinas are so insensitive to this hue...that we instead see the next most prevalent color, blue.

— from The Sun's Heartbeat by Bob Berman (2011)

Image: 7 and 12 colour circles from Traité de la peinture en mignature by Claude Boutet (1708) via Wiki