… If Wittgenstein charted colour at the furthest reaches of language (“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language”) then psychoanalysis offers ways of thinking about colour as that which is before, and beyond language. …. In the opening words of Klein’s The Monochrome Adventure, an anthology of texts conceived in 1958, the artist writes: “Through colour I experience a feeling of complete identification with space. I am totally free. If colour is no longer pure, the drama may take on disquieting overtones. For those who don’t know what it is, total freedom is dangerous.”
Above is from from an essay by Jane Alison in the book, Colour After Klein.
All of the following is from Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color by Philip Ball (2001):
…Although the birth of chemistry as such had to await the first settlements of the Middle East, the deliberate manipulation of natural materials for the purposes of art came much earlier. Cave painters took their palette from the environment. Red and yellow “earths” came from the iron oxide hematite crystallized with varying degrees of water; green earths from the aluminosilicate clays celadonite and glauconite; black from charcoal; brown from manganese oxide; and white from chalk and ground bones. At Altamira and Lascaux there is even a violet pigment made from manganese.
… we should not underestimate the ingenuity with which these unnamed hunter-gatherers made use of nature’s hues. It is one thing to smear a charcoal line on a cave wall but quite another to grind hematite systematically into a fine powder with a mortar and pestle, mix it with an organic binding medium such as vegetable oil, and apply it to a surface — a Stone Age oil paint, no less. And who was it who dreamed up the idea of spray painting the pigment with breath blown through a tube?
This is not all. The Upper Paleolithic (so-called Middle Magdalenian) artists who created the images in the Niaux caves of the Pyrenees around 12,000 B.C., for example, devised new recipes from nature’s bounty. No chemical transformations yet, but a physical mixture of pigments with “extenders,” neutral materials that made the precious pigments go further and improved their properties in a paint. Mixed with potassium feldspar, hematite becomes a little darker but sticks better to the rock surface and cracks less readily. Better still was the recipe of the Upper Magdalenians (around 10,500 B.C.), in which the feldspar extender contained some biotite, a mixture readily obtained from ground granite.
… The blue pigment known as Egyptian frit or Egyptian blue, which has been identified in artifacts dating from around 2500 B.C., is not a product of blind chance, a serendipitous outcome of fusing natural materials at random. It is wrought with precision and forethought, a blend of one part lime (calcium oxide) and one part copper oxide with four parts quartz (silica). The raw ingredients are minerals: chalk or limestone, a copper mineral such as malachite, and sand. They are fired in a kiln at temperatures of between 800 and 900 degrees Celsius (1,470-1,650 degrees Fahrenheit). The temperature is crucial, and we must suppose that the Egyptians were able to control the firing conditions with considerable accuracy. The result is an opaque, brittle blue material, which is made into a pigment by grinding it to a powder. It is the oldest synthetic pigment, a Bronze Age blue.
… Pigments are not “simply and solely colour” but substances with specific properties and attributes, not least among them cost. How is your desire for blue affected if you have just paid more for it than for the equivalent weight in gold? That yellow looks glorious, but what if its traces on your fingertips could poison you at your supper table? This orange tempts like distilled sunlight, but how do you know that it will not have faded to dirty brown by next year? What, in short, is your relationship with the materials?
… In surveying the history of colormaking, one can hardly avoid the conclusion that blue has always been special; this much should be apparent already. It is the most ancient of synthetic pigments and was venerated in the Middle Ages as emblematic of divine purity. Yet it did not take its place as a primary color until centuries after red and yellow. And despite the appearance, around 1704, of a blue pigment representing the first of the modern artificial colors, a lack of accessible, high-quality blues was keenly felt by painters until the early nineteenth century.
… there appears to be something intimidating about the dizzying varieties in which matter is composed from elemental blends and, if we are honest about it, something vaguely ominous and unsettling about the gray metallic minarets and industrial pipelines within which these blends are concocted today. It is a challenge to the imagination to connect these ugly factories and alien or unsettling names — cadmium, arsenic, antimony — with the stuff that, smeared over canvas, leaves us breathless in art galleries. Can such a villain (and the chemical industry’s transgressions are not all imaginary) be responsible for this beauty?
It has been my unhappy experience that rich purplish-blues produced by an inkjet printer often bear no resemblance to the corresponding color shown in the image on-screen. See examples of blue photos here and here and here and here.
-Julie
