The first color wheel has been attributed to Sir Isaac Newton, who in 1706 arranged red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet into a natural progression on a rotating disk. As the disk spins, the colors blur together so rapidly that the human eye sees white. From there the organization of color has taken many forms, from tables and charts, to triangles and and wheels the history.

Using text from Sarah Lowengard’s The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe we’re taking a look at the progression of color organization systems and how the color wheel came to be.

A successful color ordering system requires an appropriate shape, the correct number of colors to include, and the proper medium in which to present its information.

The First Color Organization Systems

Gautier’s color-printed picture accompanied one of his many anti-Newtonian publications about color theories. The band of color at the center imitates an illustration in Newton’s Opticks but “proves” Gautier’s assertion that all colors cannot be found in Newton’s spectrum of light.

What is the simplest design that can communicate a relationship among colors? It might be no more than a bar or line, perhaps based on the shape that appears when light is passed through a prism. Bars of colors convey two basic ideas: Color exists and it has a regular order. A linear form hints at a progression that can be linked to wavelengths or cycles, but it does not accomplish much more. It does not suggest complexities of color relationships and so does not validate other aspects of either practices or ideas. The shape and the placement of color may not be arbitrary, but the value of the system is limited.

Color Tables and Charts

Color tables expand the color bar, literally and figuratively. They offer a similarly recognizable display of information, but one that suggests interior relationships through size, shape, or placement of the colored areas.

Richard Waller’s Basic Chart

Richard Waller’s, 1686

Noting the lack of a standard for colors in natural philosophy, and inspired by a similar table published in Stockholm, Richard Waller indicated that his “Table of Physiological Colors Both Mixt and Simple,” (created in 1686) would permit unambiguous descriptions of the colors of natural bodies. To describe a plant, for example, one could compare it to the chart and use the names found there to identify the colors of the bark, wood, leaves, etc. Similar applications of the information collected in the chart might also extend to the arts and trades, he suggested.

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Color in photography has come a long way since the first permanent color photo was taking in 1861. Now nearly 150 years later we thought we would take a look and see where and how color developed in photography. Starting with the black and white beginnings.

Monochrome Photography

Monochrome photography implies the act of recording light in a single color or wavelength and includes such types of photographs as black and white, sepia, infrared photography, and X-ray photography.

Oldest surviving photo created in 1826 by inventor Nicéphore Niépce

Black and White
Black and white photography uses neutral tones of gray ranging from near white to near black, or using a grayscale.

Photo by whappen

Photography began with the discovery that silver is a light sensitive chemical. Silver halides, or silver salt compounds, break down when exposed to light and form black metallic silver2. The darker areas of a negative that received more light during exposure block the light that would reach photographic paper during printing, thus allowing the paper to remain whiter in relation to the local negative density. The lighter areas of the negative that received less light during exposure allow more light to pass during printing, darkening those areas of the print.
- wikipedia:Monochrome_Photography

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To pay tribute to the perfect pair of pants, and its attached color, we thought we would take a look at how this all got started by running through the history of blue jeans and their rise in popularity, from old west pioneers to fashion runways across the world, blue jeans have become one of fashion’s most iconic wears.

The First Pair of Blue Jeans

The word denim comes from the location of where the original makers of the fabric resided, Nîmes, France. The fabric created by the Andre family was originally called serge de Nîmes but was eventually shortened to denim.

The first denim pants date back to 17th century England, but it wasn’t until a 24 year old German immigrant named Levi Strauss moved from New York City to San Fransisco in 1853 that the first ‘blue jeans’ were created. The story goes; Levi was headed out west to start a west coast branch of his brothers’ dry-goods business. Upon arrival to San Fransisco a prospector inquired as to what Mr. Strauss was selling, which at the time was canvas sheets intended to be used for tents and wagon covers. The prospector replied telling Strauss that he should have brought pants instead, because he couldn’t find any that would stand up to the harsh conditions of life as a 19th century Californian Prospector. So, Strauss started making canvas waist overalls which became popular with miners. When the miners started complaining about chafing, Struass started looking for a new material for his pants.

Photo by icantshoot

At the same time in Reno, Nevada, a tailor named David Jacobs was constantly fixing the pockets of one of his customers who routinely tore them on his pants made by Jacobs. As a solution Jacobs had the idea of riveting the corners of the pockets, as to reinforce the seams. When the idea showed its brilliance and the pants became more and more popular, Jacobs thought he better patent the idea. The only problem was Jacobs didn’t have the money needed to apply for the patent. So he looked to his fabric supplier, who happened to be one Levi Strauss, to find a business partner. So, in 1872 Jacobs writes a proposal to Strauss telling him about his idea and asking him to be his partner. Strauss see the potential of a stronger more durable pant and agrees to the partnership. On May 20, 1873 the U.S. issues them patent no.139,121, this is now considered the ‘birthday’ of the blue jean.

Why Blue?

Blue jeans are unique because of their attachment to one singular color. One of the earliest precursors to jeans was the dungaree, a thick cotton material created in India in the 16th century. The makers of the fabric choose to use indigo as the dye because it was the most prevalent natural dye of the time, and the dark tone made it a good choice for wear and when frequent washing was not possible.


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Thine is the heritage of the world, thine the task of moulding destinies, thine the privilege of seeing all things through rose-coloured glasses.
—Charles W. Wood, The Argosy

“To see the world through rose-colored glasses” is an idiom referring to a positive outlook colored by naivety or sentimentality. As feminist commentator Pamela Varkony puts it, “Looking at the world through rose colored glasses makes for a pretty picture, but not an accurate one.” To be sure, one famous drawback of rose-colored glasses is that not everything that appears red is objectively red. Hence, the lovelorn are cautioned against wearing them: “When we are in love, or when we want to be in love, we sometimes see the world through rose-colored glasses and don’t spot the red flags” (Christine Hassler, 20 Something, 20 Everything, p. 224). Sightseers are also advised against wearing rose-colored glasses while on holiday: in Alaska, you’ll miss seeing the Northern Lights; in Australia, Mount Uluru will be invisible; in Bermuda, you could sunburn and not know it; in Switzerland, the Matterhorn will appear bright pink. Rose-colored glasses are likely rarely abused at the Grand Canyon, where at close of day the sky turns purple, the sun glows orange, and the clouds blush pink.

Whimsy aside, although the exact origin of the idiom has been lost in the “rose-coloured mist” of time (Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, 1856), we can speculate that it may reference the sanguine light of sunset, when the world is momentarily bathed in rosy radiance. That healthy glow is soon followed by twilight blindness and then impenetrable darkness—hence the air of suspicion. Ironically, though, private investigators and varmint hunters assure us that red lenses help the eyes adjust to low lighting and improve one’s night vision. That’s because red lenses filter out lower wavelengths and reveal a brighter panorama. So the poetic caution against rose-colored glasses would appear to be ill-conceived.

by Malingering.

Indeed, Dr. John Izzo suggests that figurative rose-colored glasses can be a practical tool enabling starry-eyed romantics to pinpoint their ideals and pursue them with focus. He explains: “Usually meant as an insult, [seeing the world through rose-colored glasses] is a way of saying that someone is a bit too innocent, that he or she sees the world with too much optimism. The intimation is straightforward: Wake up and smell the coffee. Some people see the world through other kinds of glasses—cynical glasses—and surely the lenses they choose color their experiences. When it comes to rediscovering wonder and innocence . . . few decisions are more critical than choosing your glasses” (Second Innocence: Rediscovering Joy and Wonder, p. 73). Dr. Izzo seems to be suggesting that in the absence of adopting some sort of rosy focal point, one is likely to see a world limited to depressing shades of grey. It’s true that “the particular glasses we wear reflect how we analyze and interpret what we see” (John Peter Rothe, Undertaking Qualitative Research, p. 137), just as the microscopic lens unlocks a richness of detail. These glasses symbolize what Prof. Jerry Griswold calls “forcible shifts in perspective, techniques for seeing things differently.” Prof. Griswold cites The Wizard of Oz, “in which Dorothy and her companions put on green glasses before entering Emerald City, and then marvel at how green everything looks. In Pollyanna, however, the equivalent image is, significantly, not rose-colored glasses, but the prism. When the girl hangs dozens of these in the windows of Mr. Pendleton’s house, we see something more than her transformation of his gloomy room into a rainbow-spangled place. We see how she has changed him in her prismatic shifts of perspectives. It is her pointing to a spectrum of possibilities, her reminding him of his freedom to choose, which leads Mr. Pendleton to conclude that Pollyanna is ‘the very prism of all’” (Audacious Kids, p. 235).

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“Octarine” is a color name coined by Terry Pratchett in his Discworld novels. Octarine is said to be the color of magic, as it is apparent in the crackling and shimmering of light. The word refers to the “eighth color,” in a spectrum of black, blue, green, yellow, purple, orange, and red. Octarine has been likened to a fluorescent greenish-yellow purple, a combination impossible to perceive with normal human eyes. Imagine, if you can, the marriage of these two swatches:

Scholar of magic Pete Carroll says he imagines Octarine to be “a particular shade of electric pinkish-purple,” a common color in optical illusions. Who can see octarine with the naked eye? Legend has it that only wizards and felines can. That’s because an ordinary eye, equipped with rods and cones, would see greenish-yellow purple as gray, black, or nothing at all, while a wizard’s eye is said to be equipped with octagons. Some people claim to catch glimpses of octarine in peacock feathers, lightning bolts, rainbows, lens flares, soap bubbles, bonfires, and gemstones.

There can be no doubt that octarine is an imaginary color. But is it preposterous to think that normal human eyes might one day be able to perceive a fluorescent greenish-yellow purple? The folks at the Conscious Entities blog posed that very question: “There has to be an octarine, doesn’t there? The mere conceivability of another color shows that the spectrum is not an absolute reality. It seems to me that, just as we can always encounter a completely new smell, there would always be scope for a new color, if our eyes were able to develop new responses the way our nose presumably can. But I don’t even need to rely on conceivability. Some insects can see ultraviolet light, for example, and some snakes can see infrared. They must assign to those wavelengths colors which we can’t see, mustn’t they?”

Their conclusion, however, is negatory: “Look at the way the spectrum forms a closed circle. If we extended it downwards below red, we should simply get another, lower, violet. Now I grant you that the ‘lowerness’ would have to be expressed in some way - possibly as ‘warmth.’ The colors of the visible spectrum are differentiated in terms of warmth, so perhaps the lower violet would appear distinctly warmer than the one we’re used to (great scope for interior decorators…). I repeat, the spectrum is a reality. You can call it a mathematical reality if that helps, but it’s real. If we saw color the way we hear pitch, all this would be obvious. But the fact that we can’t see color harmonies or more than a single octave of colors means there’s never been any scope for a genius to come along and produce a regularized interpretation of the spectrum, the way J.S.Bach did for the musical scale.”

The COLOURlovers library shimmers with magical colors, though as of this writing there’s no color named “octarine.” Some magic colors include:

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Light projection installations have been filling dark nights with radiant colors a lot in the past year. With the previously mentioned exhibit Evoke, by Usman Haque, who wrapped the facade of York Minister with projected colors that were sensitive to the sound waves created by people in the immediate area, to the recently ended Adelaide Festival exhibit, Northern Lights.

The Adelaide Festival of Arts is an innovative art festival that takes place every other year in South Australia and includes an array of events, performances, exhibits, and theater, including the incredible projection installation created by The Electric Canvas, a Sydney production team.

Photo by SpacePotato

During the Festival which ran from February 29th through March 16th, an estimated 15,000 people made their way each night to see the multi-building installation light up with 70 different projections that changed every five minutes. The turnout must have been a little unexpected because the installation was extended two weeks beyond the original ending date to March 30th. Even though the installation was such a success the festival honored Earth Hour on March 29th by turning off the lights for one hour.

The 2008 festival as a whole was also a huge success, with the announcement that box office projections were vastly exceeded.

The Electric Canvas

The Electric Canvas team, who provides design, production, technical and creative services for installation, used huge projectors that weighed in around 200k (440lbs) to project a selection of patterns and colors on the State Library of South Australia, the Institute Building, South Australian Museum, as well as the Art Gallery of South Australia, and three landmark university buildings including the Mitchell Building, Bonython Hall and Elder Hall.

Photo by SpacePotato


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Established in 1932, the Pure Photography movement boasted a palette with a maximum of two colors. Pure photography was defined as being completely free of any other artistic movement. That meant it had to be free of qualities of technique, composition, and objective. Due to its strict requirements, the possible body of work was severely limited. That’s why the visual poet Geof Huth calls Pure Photography “one of the shortest artistic movements of all time.” As it is such a narrow school of art, Huth was able to complete all the possible works of the genre in a single day. He explains: “A black & white photograph might look like it is made out of grays, but it is made out of bits of black organized on the surface of a white sheet, so in its purest form it is either all black or all white.”

by waffler

Huth’s technique was simple: “The black photograph must be exposed to uncontrolled light, so I turned on the lights in the darkroom, exposed the paper & then developed the photograph. The white photograph must never be exposed to light; it is fixed so that it never changes from its white beginnings. I framed one of these photographs in a bright metal frame, but I don’t know where it is anymore.”

Here are some colors and palettes from the COLOURlovers library reminiscent of the short-lived Pure Photography movement.

Cover by Breno Peck.

About the Guest Author, Craig Conley
Website: http://www.OneLetterWords.com
Craig is an independent scholar and author of dozens of strange and unusual books, including a unicorn field guide and a dictionary of magic words. He also loves color: Prof. Oddfellow

“It was color as such, naked color, unabashedly itself, and assertively dominant.”
—Elizabeth Frank, Esteban Vicente

So-called “naked colors” expose a stark naturalness that many viewers would consider titillating or indiscreet. Naked colors invite the viewer to peek into an intimate range of wavelengths that yield a profoundly sensual impression and uncover a hidden truth. Naked colors embody what the French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls “interpenetration,” wherein the fine line between a public arena and a private one starts “gaping open” (qtd. in Henry James and the Philosophical Novel, by Merle A. Williams, 1993). In other words, Merleau-Ponty is suggesting that a naked color on a visible surface can serve to lead the imagination toward something typically not visible.

Naked colors appear in the art world and the natural world. The red and gold Santa Rita mountains and the violet Catalina mountains of Arizona display a “wild bright beauty” of “naked color” (Glenn Hughes, Broken Lights: A Book of Verse, 1920). In the springtime in London’s city parks, flower bulbs “break against the renewing grass in naked colour” (David Piper, The Companion Guide to London, 1983). In the Dutch painter Pieter Mondrian’s later work, he focused his attention to “‘naked’ colour dynamics: patches of pure red, yellow and blue held in place by a grid of black lines (Jon Thompson, How to Read a Modern Painting, 2006). In the world of fashion, “naked color turns into decorationism” (Marc Chagall, Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, 2003). However, quantum physicists tell us that “naked colour is never to be seen” in quarks (Nigel Calder, Magic Universe: The Oxford Guide to Modern Science, 2003).

The COLOURlovers library is full of naked color inspiration. (Viewer discretion advised.)

Cover by auntie.

About the Guest Author, Craig Conley
Website: http://www.OneLetterWords.com
Craig is an independent scholar and author of dozens of strange and unusual books, including a unicorn field guide and a dictionary of magic words. He also loves color: Prof. Oddfellow

Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1961, Beatriz Milhazes works in the pure aesthetic style of the Pattern and Decoration movement. Influenced by her native land of Brazil, her vibrant and bold use of color and patterns create work that is as much playful, free and psychedelic, as it is geometric, organized and rhythmic.

The Pattern and Decoration movement was not originally popular in the art world because of the movements lack of political statements and stances, “art for arts sake:” “Though playful and innovative, especially in the use of materials, Pattern and Decoration didn’t make much of an impact in the art world. It was dismissed as frivolous, with the work regarded as purely decorative and thus not warranting serious critical or curatorial attention.” (NYT: Fresh Eyes on a Colorful Movement) What was deemed not worth talking about has now gained global visibility since its beginnings in the 70’s and 80’s.

Photo from tate.org.uk

The Decoration and Pattern movement is not completely detached from society and the world around it. I feel the art, and artists involved, take a very positive stance that speaks not from the created politics and mottos of the mind, but from love and the appreciation for the beauty that surrounds us. And this philosophy of focusing more on the pleasures of life, rather than its hardships, is very evident in the shapes, colors and patterns of each of Milhazes’ piece.

Photo from James Cohan Gallery

Inspiration

Many of these explosions of colour originate in her small, compact studio, where she has been based since 1987. It is situated right next door to Rio’s luscious botanical gardens, and, inevitably, the forms and patterns of the flowers – delicate swirls and leaf-like shapes – have found their way into her paintings. She has also “taken advantage of the atmosphere of the city”, with its rich urban mix incorporating chitão (the cheap, colourful Brazilian fabric), jewellery, embroidery and folk art. Other influences range from architectural – the work of Roberto Burle Marx, the landscape architect and garden designer who created the five-kilometre Copacabana beach promenade in Rio – to Pop symbols such as Emilio Pucci fabric patterns. Painterly inspiration comes from the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Albert Eckhout, who travelled through colonial Brazil, and the Brazilian Modernist Tarsila do Amaral, as well as Mondrian, Matisse and Bridget Riley.
- In the Studio, tate.org.uk

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The fiery color red has long been controversial — so controversial, in fact, that it is commonly banned outright lest it inflame strong emotions, spark revolution, kindle anger, inspire boldness, instigate bloodshed, arouse lust, or provoke pain. Is it preposterous to think that a single color can be dangerous to society? Consider the following examples of forbidden reds from modern to ancient times. Then ask yourself: do you dare to use or wear the color red today? Is red worth the risk of arrest, imprisonment, or even a death sentence? Ultimately, is red (or any color) worth championing?

Director Michael Mann banned the color red from appearing in his film Miami Vice, as he has a personal dislike for red and other earth tones. (Source: New York Times.)

The American Civil Liberties Union reported the first known instance of an educational institution reacting to gang fears by banning a primary color. In reaction to school vandalism and the threat of violence, “officials at Round Rock High School in Texas banned the color red. … Apparently the gang responsible for these incidents wore red—about forty students wearing red items were sequestered in the library, and the parents were called.” (Source: Leland Gregory, Hey, Idiot!: Chronicles of Human Stupidity.)

In 1887, Chicago police banned the color red from labor union advertisements of the Knights of Labor. This was a colorful example of the anti-Communist “red scare.” (Source: Economic History Encyclopedia.)

Daniels Farm Elementary School in Trumbull, Connecticut banned its teachers from using red ink to grade student homework. Apparently, parents objected to red as being “too stressful” and symbolic of negativity. “The disillusionment with red is part of a major shift in grading, and three top pen manufacturers have heard the complaints. As a result, Bic, Pilot Pen, and Sanford (the manufacturer of Papermate and Sharpie) are producing more purple pens in response to rising sales. According to Pilot Pen’s vice president of marketing, school leaders are ‘trying to be positive and reinforcing rather than being harsh. Teachers are taking that to heart.’” (Source: Lisa Orlando, “The Ink That Teachers Use To Grade Papers Has Parents Seeing Red.”)

The government of Saudi Arabia banned the color red around Valentine’s Day, in a move to discourage Muslims from observing the Western holiday. Red flowers, plush hearts, wrapping paper, and other red items were illegal to sell. As a result of the ban on red roses, a black market has flowered. (Source: Saudi Gazette.)

In Israel, the color red was banned from kosher clothing stores. (Source: Sensationalcolor.com.)

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