Tag Archives: Victoria Finlay

RGB Colorspace Atlas and Mantis Shrimp

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RGB Colorspace Atlas, Volume 2 (2011)
As part of Ecstatic Alphabets, MoMA has a set Tauba Auerbach’s colorful books on view. These three thick objects display every color the human eye can see in a three-dimensional, ordered way. The museum plaque probably describes the project best:

“Human eyes typically have three types of color receptors on their retinas, each sensitive to a different range of wavelengths of light. The colors associated with these wavelengths are approximately red, green, and blue. Because there are three types of color receptors, it is possible to map the visible spectrum in a three-dimensional spatial model by assigning red, green, and blue each to a dimension. It is then possible to outline a cube in this space, where the values of red, green, and blue are visible on a gradient scale of 0 – 100% in their respective dimensions. These gradients combine to create the RGB color space cube, a volume in which any color can be located by a set of three coordinates. RGB Colorspace Atlas, both a sculptural object and spatialization of color, consists of three books. Each volume contains the entire visible spectrum mapped out over 3,632 pages, representing the RGB cube sliced in a different direction: vertically, horizontally, and from front to back.”

Of course, the volumes at MoMA were behind glass cases, so no one can flip through them. This video helps you imagine it though: 

Radiolab recently did a fascinating episode on color (bringing in Victoria Finlay, whose book I wrote about, as a guest). As the Auerbach blurb notes, human eyes typically have three types of color receptors (although a few women may have four through a quirk of genetics). However, some animals have many more–and thus see many more wavelengths, and colors, than we can imagine. The technicolor mantis shrimp has 16 kinds of color receptors. Can you imagine what the world looks like to it? Or, for that matter, what an attempt at spatial representation of its color spectrum would look like?

For more about woman with four kinds of color receptors, the discovery of color, whether color existed in the same way to Homer and the ancient Greeks, and much more, I highly recommend the Radiolab episode.

Making Color

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Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay is a group of  digressive tales and fascinating anecdotes that together create a history of the colors that man has used. While bone black comes from animal bones despite some ghastly tales, brown was sometimes made with human remains, preferably that of mummies. White’s history tends to be deadly. Artists had many options to create white before the late arrival of titanium white, but tended to prefer poisonous lead white. Aside from being deadly (so thus not a very good choice for the white lead facepaint ladies of a certain era used), lead white also must be used correctly or it will turn black (as it has in some of the Dunhuang caves in China). Knowledge of how to create and properly use such paints have often been carefully guarded secrets, passed down from artist to apprentice and in families. Deceitful colormen would create and sell paints that looked good, but didn’t last. In fact, it is only recently that we expect paint colors to last. Perhaps that was on William Turner’s mind when he knowingly used paints that would fade, and refused to touch discolored works up when people brought them back only a few years later.

Early paintbox, early 1800s

Finlay also makes the interesting point that it is only recently, in the past 200 years or so, that artists have been divorced from the creation of the paints that they use. The ability to buy pre-made paint and the change in social status from craftsman to artist occurred around the same time, probably not conincedentally. I’ve only read about how humans originally sourced and created the pigments of ochre, black, brown, and white, and I’m totally hooked. I can’t wait to learn about the ‘real’ colors.