Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay Page A
Authors: Victoria Finlay
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and I will paint you a luminous picture if you give me time to gradate my mud and subdue my dust.”
JOHN RUSKIN
At first I found it odd to include black or brown in a book called Color. After all, one thing that had intrigued me originally was the brightness of my quest, and how our magpie needs for shiny colors had inspired incredible journeys. And anyway, I thought, there probably aren’t many interesting stories connected with people burning lumps of wood to make charcoal crayons, or collecting mud for dyeing. But I was wrong. As I read more, I began to hear intriguing stories about the “non-colors.” Of how black dye used to be sold by retired pirates in the Caribbean, how “pencil lead” was once so rare that armed security guards in northern England used to strip-search miners as they left after a long day in the heart of a hill, how white paint was a poison (but tantalizingly sweet tasting), and how both brown and black paints were once said to be made from dead bodies.
So before I set out on my travels to see Afghan jewels on a Virgin’s scarf, to enjoy the richness of an iodine sunset or to discover the secrets of lost green vases, I went first to the land of shadows. Every part of life has them, and in art, perhaps more obviously than anywhere else, it’s the shadows and the shit which make the light bits believable. “Ashes and decomposition” was how I described the non-colors dismissively to a conservator friend, before my research had really started. “Exactly,” she said with satisfaction. “Sums up the painter’s art perfectly . . . Have you watched an artist start a painting?” Of course, I protested. “Then watch again.” So I did. In rural Shropshire I watched the icon painter Aidan Hart transfer his pencil sketch of the head of Christ to a gessoed panel— by tracing it onto the back of paper that had been rubbed with brown ochre; in Indonesia I watched artists sketch with charcoal before adding any paint to their Hindu story designs; in China I watched a calligrapher painstakingly grind his pine-soot ink onto his grandfather’s ink stone before even selecting the paper he was to write on; in the National Gallery in London I stood for a long time in the near-darkness before Leonardo da Vinci’s full-size cartoon of the Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, drawn in charcoal and black and white chalk—soft materials to smooth in the highlights of the Christ Child’s shoulder and the tenderness of a mother’s face.
And each time I marvelled at how so many paintings begin with a period of alert attention accompanied by the careful rubbing of dirt—earth or mud or dust or soot or rock—onto a piece of cloth or paper or wood or wall. The bright colors and the translucence come later, and when the highlights are added they always need the lowlights or shadows to make them seem real. Sometimes the drawings are even better than the paintings. Giorgio Vasari 1 wrote vividly about how sketches, “born in a moment from the fire of art,” have a quality that finished works sometimes lack. Perhaps it is simply the spontaneity, but perhaps it is also the effect of black, gray and white which makes a sketch seem so complete. Just as white light contains all the colors, so—as I would discover in my travels through the inkwell—black paint can incorporate the spectrum too.
It was this theory—that “black” happens when an object is absorbing all the colored wavelengths—which led many of the Impressionist painters to stop using black pigments in favor of mixtures of red, yellow and blue. “There is no black in nature” was the popular refrain of this group of nineteenth-century artists, whose intention was to capture the fleeting effects of light in their paintings. In Claude Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare , for example, the pitch-dark locomotives in his busy station are actually made up of extremely vivid colors—including bright vermilion red, French ultramarine
JOHN RUSKIN
At first I found it odd to include black or brown in a book called Color. After all, one thing that had intrigued me originally was the brightness of my quest, and how our magpie needs for shiny colors had inspired incredible journeys. And anyway, I thought, there probably aren’t many interesting stories connected with people burning lumps of wood to make charcoal crayons, or collecting mud for dyeing. But I was wrong. As I read more, I began to hear intriguing stories about the “non-colors.” Of how black dye used to be sold by retired pirates in the Caribbean, how “pencil lead” was once so rare that armed security guards in northern England used to strip-search miners as they left after a long day in the heart of a hill, how white paint was a poison (but tantalizingly sweet tasting), and how both brown and black paints were once said to be made from dead bodies.
So before I set out on my travels to see Afghan jewels on a Virgin’s scarf, to enjoy the richness of an iodine sunset or to discover the secrets of lost green vases, I went first to the land of shadows. Every part of life has them, and in art, perhaps more obviously than anywhere else, it’s the shadows and the shit which make the light bits believable. “Ashes and decomposition” was how I described the non-colors dismissively to a conservator friend, before my research had really started. “Exactly,” she said with satisfaction. “Sums up the painter’s art perfectly . . . Have you watched an artist start a painting?” Of course, I protested. “Then watch again.” So I did. In rural Shropshire I watched the icon painter Aidan Hart transfer his pencil sketch of the head of Christ to a gessoed panel— by tracing it onto the back of paper that had been rubbed with brown ochre; in Indonesia I watched artists sketch with charcoal before adding any paint to their Hindu story designs; in China I watched a calligrapher painstakingly grind his pine-soot ink onto his grandfather’s ink stone before even selecting the paper he was to write on; in the National Gallery in London I stood for a long time in the near-darkness before Leonardo da Vinci’s full-size cartoon of the Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, drawn in charcoal and black and white chalk—soft materials to smooth in the highlights of the Christ Child’s shoulder and the tenderness of a mother’s face.
And each time I marvelled at how so many paintings begin with a period of alert attention accompanied by the careful rubbing of dirt—earth or mud or dust or soot or rock—onto a piece of cloth or paper or wood or wall. The bright colors and the translucence come later, and when the highlights are added they always need the lowlights or shadows to make them seem real. Sometimes the drawings are even better than the paintings. Giorgio Vasari 1 wrote vividly about how sketches, “born in a moment from the fire of art,” have a quality that finished works sometimes lack. Perhaps it is simply the spontaneity, but perhaps it is also the effect of black, gray and white which makes a sketch seem so complete. Just as white light contains all the colors, so—as I would discover in my travels through the inkwell—black paint can incorporate the spectrum too.
It was this theory—that “black” happens when an object is absorbing all the colored wavelengths—which led many of the Impressionist painters to stop using black pigments in favor of mixtures of red, yellow and blue. “There is no black in nature” was the popular refrain of this group of nineteenth-century artists, whose intention was to capture the fleeting effects of light in their paintings. In Claude Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare , for example, the pitch-dark locomotives in his busy station are actually made up of extremely vivid colors—including bright vermilion red, French ultramarine
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