Monthly Archives: August 2012

Color Redux

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A run down of great links on color, what it is and how we see it as well as how other species perceive it, how our perception has changed historically, and what we could see in the future:

  • Secondly, two articles that borrow heavily from the Radiolab episode but goes on to address how naming colors impacts our ability to see them in more detail: here and here.
  • Thirdly, a TED Talk by an artist who has never seen color but, thanks to a device he has created, can now hear it: here.

And I’ll throw in some of my own posts to round things off:

RGB Colorspace Atlas by Tara Auerbach and Mantis Shrimp
http://artsravel.blogspot.com/2012/07/rgb-colorspace-atlas-and-mantis-shrimp.html
Making Color: about Victoria Finlay’s history of color
http://artsravel.blogspot.com/2011/12/color.html
Celadon Talking Jars
http://artsravel.blogspot.com/2011/12/celadon-talking-jars.html
Black’s historical uses
http://artsravel.blogspot.com/2011/12/back-to-black.html
based on ARTNews’s article
http://www.artnews.com/2011/11/24/the-color-that-wasn%E2%80%99t-a-color/
The making of red, orange, and yellow
http://artsravel.blogspot.com/2011/12/red-orange-yellow.html

In the Archives: Lowell Boyers

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Red Boat, White Paint, Still Travelling, 2010

Going through my drafts archives, I found this unposted image of a Lowell Boyer’s painting. More of the artist’s mixed media works on paper and canvas can be found on his website, all a bit phantasmagorical, beautiful layered, even decorative like a China pattern gone wrong. I believe I saw this at the Von Lintel Gallery’s booth at an art fair last year…but much like the figures in these works, the memory is unclear.

Maine Interlude

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Maine has a gorgeous, rugged coastline. I just spent a week around Blue Hill, Maine with family, not doing much besides visiting, eating, and playing with color settings on my camera that I didn’t know I had.

The seaweed there is a bright yellow-orange that reminded me of one of my favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, who came from Maine.

I shall go back again to the bleak shore
And build a little shanty on the sand
In such a way that the extremest band
Of brittle seaweed will escape my door
But by a yard or two, and nevermore
Shall I return to take you by the hand;
I shall be gone to what I understand
And happier than I ever was before.

The love that stood a moment in your eyes,
The words that lay a moment on your tongue,
Are one with all that in a moment dies,
A little under-said and over-sung;
But I shall find the sullen rocks and skies
Unchanged from what they were when I was young.
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
I imagine the coast of Maine in winter would be a bleak thing indeed. In summer, however, it’s quite glorious.