Ultramarine

The inevitable has occurred. My current obsession with color has collided with my lifelong passion for words. Try to get to sleep after that accident!

Much more than Finlay does, Ball drops bits of information about the words by which we refer to colors. Both bemoan the incredibly complicated linguistic history of "red"; and that being my favorite color, more about that will undoubtedly appear at some point in this blog.

However, last night the nugget concerned "ultramarine". All my life, well, anyway since I learned the word, it has meant blue; dictionaries concur: bright deep blue. And, for me, that's always been it. Red is red, black, black, blue, blue, and ultramarine, a blue special enough to have its own name. "Deep blue"? As in deep (ultra) blue sea (marine)? But of course. If I ever thought about it, that's likely the association I would have made, and perhaps others as well. (I'm in danger here of teaching my grandmother to suck eggs, for which the punishment should be death.)

I am however, teaching myself to suck eggs! I've studied both Latin and Greek and have always been able to call upon those languages to decipher unknown words I come across. Where in hell were they whenever I've used the word "ultramarine"?

The color of the sea is not germane here. These are Ball's words that kicked me in the cortex last night:

Lapis lazuli is found primarily in the East. . . . Its use in the West did not become widespread until the fourteenth century. The name reflects the pigment's status as a long distance import: in 1464 the Italian A. A. Filarete wrote in Trattato dell'artchitettura that "fine blue is derived from a stone and comes from across the sea and so is called ultramarine."

I knew that! NOT! Though I do know that the pure Latin word "ultra" translates to beyond, on the far side of. As in, "beyond the sea". Sometimes the synapses simply take forever to establish a connection -- ummm, something like broadband in Vermont.

AND, a footnote here to mention a new page attached to this blog: because once posts roll off the first page, they are rarely accessed by readers. Which means, books I've mentioned fall off the edge. I've added a link (top right) to the White River Book List. All books mentioned here, and some from my former blogs, will be kept there with my annotations.

Bright Earth - a must read

A while back on my former blog, I posted about getting a copy of Finlay's Color and how excited I was about it. Well, let's revisit that. I finally gave it up on page 258 (out of 302). There was just too, too much of "cute".

Frederico Buskak in his little boat wandering among the Greek isles looking for a home, how excited he must have been to come with his little bag of colors to the shores of Venice.

I made that up of course, but damn I hate that kind of stuff. Once maybe, but such passages increased in number as the book went on. Does the author think that people without imaginations read books like this one? I can do my own imagining, and do it when I care to do it. If that stuff had been edited out, the book would have likely been a lot shorter--oh and there was the young Greek girl pining for her absent lover by means of charcoal on a wall. And!! And!! Finlay spends a large chunk of the book on Australian Aboriginal paintings and makes them sound incredibly interesting--however, among the 21 plates, there is not one example. And "lake", though mentioned often, is not in the index, etc., etc. Grrrr.

Anyway, in my first post about that book, our David Kearns commented that I might enjoy Bright Earth by Philip Ball. A long time ago I had that book on a list, but it never got bought. So, to celebrate turning in my proposal I bought it. NOW this one is a book worth reading!

Here is Ball on why color's use and its theory should go hand in hand:
But only by appreciating the why [of how color comes into being] can one truly understand the social and technological factors that brought these colors onto the palette. Moreover, some basic facts about color mixing have a strong bearing on the uses to which painters have put their pure and shining pigments (whether they knew it or not). . . . I should reprise my assertion that in the end the differentiation between the two is only a relatively modern idea. I feel sure that Leonardo would have damned any book that claimed to speak of color without explaining it.

Bright Earth: Get a copy!

OT - but Interesting

As someone who loves looking at dishes in department stores, or anywhere for that matter, and who thinks one should not have a "set" of dishes, but rather plates, bowls, cups, etc. that are all different and simply selected because the owner likes them, I offer this link to a fine article in the New York Times about the recent troubles of Wedgewood.

It's a nice view of commercial "art" and business history, though quite sad.

And, also OT, but a bit less, I spent my $25 Barnes and Noble gift card yesterday and happily came home with a small, lovely book of Walker Evans photographs. (I already own the Getty Museum book of his sign images.) This one has a broader selection. I also scooped up another book: Color by Victoria Finlay. This is going to be a real treasure trove of trivia. Ever since I mucked about making my own etching inks years ago and just for the hell of it, immersed my hand in a bag of vermilion, I've never stopped drooling over naked colors. That was around the same time I discovered Winsor & Newton gouache on a paint chip card in my local art store. I came home with as many as I could afford, and put them all on a piece of tracing paper with a toothpick. Years later, I still like it. It's about the only thing I've left from my days in art school. (The brown is the masonite showing through.)

The cover of the Finlay book looks like a shot of pan watercolors in a ceramic framework, but it is actually an image of the front of some (cursedly unidentified) building with windows of unpatterned color--I can't tell whether they are glass or paint. The bibliography and notes are extensive which makes the non-identification of the cover shot all the more frustrating.