Page 57 - Vol. VI #3

sidered them a “feature of our perception of the world” (library.si.edu). Goethe modified New- ton’s color wheel, linked colors to personality types, and influenced nineteenth-century artists. Yet today’s color wheel corresponds mostly to Newton’s. The primary colors, red, yellow, and blue, mix to create secondary colors, with tint and hue determined by additions of white or black, and primaries and secondaries blend to create tertiaries, such as blue-green or turquoise (en.wikipedia.org ).
centuries people who should have known better pretended that color scarcely mattered” (smith- sonianmag.com).However, Vinzenz Brinkmann, a German archaeologist, having revealed pigment residues on the original works under ultravio- lent light, has matched the ancient compounds and hand-painted plaster and marble replicas. “Vitality is what the Greeks were after,” Brink- mann says about the Cuirass-Torso from the Acropolis, “that, and the charge of the erotic... Dressing this torso and giving it color was a way to make the body sexier.”
Show your true colors, we say, meaning your au- thentic values and nature, which we disguise for various reasons. Chameleons change color as a defense mechanism. We use camouflage to blend soldiers and equipment into the landscape, so they won’t be detected and targeted. One’s “col- ors” are also the flag or nation for which they fight. Instance the pirate ship, lowering its British flag and flying the Jolly Roger.
.Children with crayons, pencils, or water colors quickly learn that red and blue make purple, yel- low and blue make green, etc. We tell them that
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“Green with envy. Greenhorn. True blue. Blue in the face. In
the pink. Yellow livered. Feeling blue.”
My wife still colors her hair, presumably to look younger in our ageist culture. I colored my own for several years, feeling that remaining brown helped me to fit in better with students and col- leagues. But then I stopped, wearied of my own vanity. I remember, too, meeting an African-Amer- ican businessman decades before (we’d both been in our late twenties), and his boasting that he dyed his hair with streaks of white, so his clients, workers, and family would respect him as wise. Now my students dye their hair from brown, black, red, or blonde to green tips, blue, vermil- lion: “unnatural” colors on purpose.
white comes from mixing the primary colors to- gether, though it never seems to work. And black, supposedly “the absence of color,” is an outlier, a crayon, pencil, or ink all its own. At two or three, my granddaughter colored before she could draw, so I drew outlines for her in ball-point, and she colored them in, grass, sky, clouds, tree trunk, leaves, flowers, her colors enlivening even my inept sketches.
The peacock’s tail fans full and iridescent to be- dazzle peahens. Likewise most male birds are more colorful than females, perhaps because the females prefer “bright colors in males,” or because dull colors protect females “while incubating” from predators. Colors help birds to recognize their kind, to warn off predators, and between males signal that a mate and territory are taken
Greek and Roman sculptures were originally col- orized, reports Matthew Gurewitsch in Smithson- ian Magazine: “[The Greeks]...thought of their gods in living color and portrayed them that way too. The temples that housed them were in color, also, like mighty stage sets. Time and weather have stripped most of the hues away. And for
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