Page 58 - Vol. VI #3
P. 58

On Color (continued from preceding page)
and “the occupant is in good condition and pre-
Andrew Levy in 1851, and Gabriel Lippmann
in 1886 was the first to produce a color photo- graph “without the aid of any pigments or dyes,” for which he won the Nobel in Physics in 1906. Color film and cameras became widely available in the 1920s. As a boy, I developed black-and- white snapshots at home, but had to send away exposed color film for processing either as slides or prints. Self-developing Color Polaroids began in the late 1950s. And since the 1990s, digital photography has replaced analogue. Full-color selfies abound.
 pared to fight” (scientificamerican.com).
Artists, designers, psychologists, and psychics link colors to emotion. There are hot colors and cold. Red “radiates pure energy and increases the pulse rate,” yellow “stimulates mental activity,” blue is calm and stable, and soothes pain, green recalls nature and money. For those who claim to see au- ras, red indicates an adventurous spirit, yellow an analytic one, pink a generous and healing, black a hateful, etc. Painters use color to create a 3-D il- lusion on the 2-D canvas: red appears to advance, blue to recede.
Not all color is reflected light. There is translu- cence, as with filters, stained glass windows, col- or slides or glowing canopies of leaves. There are incandescence (Edison’s lightbulb), chemilumi- nescence, and fluorescence or phosphorescence. Think of city lights: neon signs, LCD billboards and TVs, strings of holiday lights, ballpark arc lights, search lights, the flashing lights of emer- gency vehicles. My LCD backlit computer screen, and its 227 pixels per inch.
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Following Goethe’s theory of perception, Impres- sionists and Post-Impressionists freed color as an “intrinsic property of objects” and painted emo- tion using “non-naturalistic colors and forms”. Hence a green face, a red studio, a blue man, and eventually a cubist nude descending the staircase. They explored how colors from either side of the color wheel combine to please the eye, but clash with their opposite; how the attributes of color are determined by the amount of red and green or of blue and yellow; how any color will “cast a shadow” tinged with its opposite; and how each is “more distinctly seen when next to its contrary” (webexhibits.org).
Milton Glaser’s poster of Bob Dylan’s mental rain- bow prefigures MRI images of orgasms in the brain, beginning with red and flooding with yel- low and white as synapses fire and oxygen levels change (jezebel.com).
In prose, Flaubert conveys Charles’s infatuated vision of Emma Bovary much as a portrait by Renoir: “The parasol, of dovegrey, iridescent silk, with the sun shining through it, cast moving glimmers of light over the white skin of her face. She was smiling beneath it in the mild warmth; and they could hear the drops of water, one by one, falling over the taut moire.” And Heming- way spoke of his “Big Two-Hearted River,” as an attempt “to do the landscape in the manner of Cezanne.”
Colorful language means rich in metaphor and emotion, though an off-color remark is one con- sidered earthy and crude. By contrast, language is colorless when bland and denotative. Attitudes and feelings color our judgments and percep- tions. In blue light, red paint appears black. Black light causes minerals to fluoresce (hence flores- cent body paint).
Still photography, starting in 1839, seemed purely representational. We have Mathew Brady’s Daguerreotypes of the Civil War and of Lincoln; however, color experiments began with
In “The Investment,” Robert Frost speculates about a backwoods couple, who have suddenly painted their house and bought a piano to “get some music and color out of life.”
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My parents and I visited my oldest brother, who had settled in Colorado (“colored red”).


















































































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