Essays on Colour

Essays on Colour ESSAYS ON COLOUR A collection of columns from Cabinet Magazine Eleanor Maclure Introduction For every issue the editors of Cabinet Magazine, an American quarterly arts and culture journal, ask one of their regular contributors to write about a specific colour. The essays are printed as Cabinet’s regular Colours Column. To date, forty-two different colours have been the subject of discussion, beginning with Bice in their first ever issue. I first encountered Cabinet magazine when I stumbled upon Darren Wershler-Henry’s piece about Ruby, on the internet. I have since been able to collect all of the published columns and they have provided a wealth of knowledge, information and invaluable research about colour and colour names. Collectively, the writings represent a varied and engaging body of work, with approaches ranging from the highly factual to the deeply personal. From the birth of his niece in Matthew Klam’s Purple, to a timeline of the history of Lapis Lazuli mining in Ultramarine by Matthew Buckingham, the essays have provided fascinating insights into a whole range of colours, from basic terms such as black and red, to the more obscure: porphyry and puce. While some focus very much on the colour in question, others diverge into intricate tales of history, chemistry or geopolitics. There are personal anecdotes, legends and conspiracies, but more than that, the essays demonstrate the sheer diversity of ways we can talk about colour. The essays gathered here have become far more than just the background reading they began as. The aim of this book is to bring together the works, as a unique representation of the different ways we relate to, experience and interpret colours. Essays on Colour “...all the elements of the world must be in me, in everyone— would mingle with the copper and make a union, a new thing, alchemically, chemically, pigmentally. And that thing was the color bice, a good color” BICE JONATHAN AMES hen I was a little boy, I liked to pick my nose. I opened my dictionary—it’s an OED for the In fact, I’ve enjoyed picking my nose for most field, so to speak; it’s about the size of the Bible, as Wof my life. This is not something to be proud opposed to the colossus numerous-volume regular of, but telling you about my nosepicking brings me to OED. I found bice, though, out of curiosity, I checked the word bice. Perhaps it’s not clear how this brings my American Heritage Dictionary, and there was me to bice, but I will try to explain. no bice. Good thing I have my Junior OED. What I The good and clever editors at Cabinet asked me encountered in the dictionary was this: “pigments to write about a color. I said I would do this. I am a made from blue, green, hydrocarbonate of copper; writer and writers usually say yes when editors offer similar pigment made from smalt, etc.; dull shades of them work. So the idea was that they would choose blue & green given by these.” the color for me and I was to respond. But they didn’t Well, my immediate response to bice was straight give me the color right away, they told me they would out of the ethers of my long ago childhood; it was call me back in a few days. Fine, I said, and I looked Proustian; it was tactile; it was visual; it was beautiful, forward to this. I saw it as a version of that classic word sad, and lonely. It was better than blue or red or association game—the pschia-trist says to you, “Just yellow. What I saw in my mind’s eye, my soul’s heart, tell me the first thing that comes to your mind after I was the standing, tube-like copper lamp, which used give you a word.” Then he says, for example, “Cereal” to be beside the couch in the living room of the house and you say, “Morning,” and then he says, “Picnic,” I grew up in. And every night, I would sit on this couch and you say, “Apples, no—copulation,” and nobody in the darkness, alongside this unlighted lamp, and figures anything out, but the game is fun to play. So I I would watch television all by my very young (six, waited for my color, to which I was going to respond seven, eight; this went on for years), lonesome, yet to with immediate first-thought, first-feeling sensitivity happy self. I felt a solitary contentment in the darkness and clarity and enthusiasm. I did find myself, though, watching my programs before dinner, my mother cheating and mentally preparing my essay in advance, cooking in the kitchen beside the living room, and hoping for blue, about which I could write about my all the while as I absorbed the stories from the TV grandfather’s eyes, or red, the color of my hair, my and soaked up the radiation from that ancient, large son’s hair, my great-aunt’s hair, my grandmother’s hair, contraption (TVs, like cars, were made uniformly big numerous uncles’ and cousins’ hair, and I envisioned back then), I would pick and pick my nose and then an essay with the winning title A Family of Red Heads, wipe my small treasures in the tubing and grooves or just Red Heads. of that long lamp. And no one saw me doing this Then the phone call came. The Cabinet editor said, because I was in the darkness. And the effect of my “Your color is bice.” I was silent, mildly ashamed at a salty mucous—like sea air on a statue—was that the deficient vocabulary, as well as a deficient knowledge copper lamp slowly, in streaky spots, turned greenish- of colors. Blue and red were striking me as quite blue. To everyone but me this was a mystery. “Why pedestrian now. “Do you need to look it up?” asked is this lamp eroding?” my father would sometimes the editor. “Don’t worry if you do. I didn’t know it ponder. either. It was my colleague’s idea... Do you want On occasion, showing largesse, I would put my something easier? Like yellow?” snotty treasures on the underside of the wooden I felt tempted to say yes. My eyes are often yellow coffee table in front of the couch and our dog Toto, because of a dysfunctional liver, and I immediately named by my older sister after Toto in the Wizard of thought about how I could write about my liver and Oz, would come and bend his red and brown Welsh about the body’s humors. But steeling myself, showing Terrier neck and happily and aggressively lick up the a flinty courage, I said, “No, bice is fine. I have a good snots. I can still see him in my mind, craning to get dictionary. I’m on it. You can count on a thousand under the table. And my parents and relatives would words on bice from me.” notice this and everyone thought that he must like the We rang off. taste of wood. I was clandestine in my actions, but I didn’t feel too much shame about any of this—nose picking was too much something I had to do. But as I got older, the lamp was looking more and more terrible, and there was talk of throwing it out. I secretly tried to clean it, but the blue-green streaks would not go away. But I didn’t want this lamp to be forsaken by my family; things back then, objects, were nearly animate to me, dear even, and to lose a thing from the living room, my special room of TV and darkness, would be terrible. I wanted everything to stay the same forever; and, too, I felt horribly guilty that I was killing this lamp. So I pleaded with my parents on its behalf, told them I loved the lamp, and it wasn’t thrown away. With this reprieve, I tried not to wipe my snots on it anymore, to only coat the bottom of the coffee table and feed my beautiful dog, but sometimes I would weaken, and I’d find a new unstreaked spot—I could feel them with my fingers—and so I’d make my mark, my hydrocarbonated snot—there must be hydrogen and carbon in my mucous, all the elements of the world must be in me, in everyone—would mingle with the copper and make a union, a new thing, alchemically, chemically, pigmentally. And that thing was the color bice, a good color, I think, because it has brought back to me that TV and darkened living room and childhood and lamp and coffee table and beloved dog—all things gone a long time ago. All things that didn’t last forever. “—Most people think if colors have attributes such as good or evil, that the color of evil is either the red of arterial blood gushing from a wound, or the deepest black of the darkest night sky. While these are certainly evil colors, they are not as evil as beige.... The most evil color has to appear benign.” BEIGE ANDREA CODRINGTON eige is the color of evil, or at least that’s what —It’s just beige to beige Aaron Priven thinks. Priven, the author of the That’s all it is these days, BInternet’s only website dedicated to that most Little windows for you to crawl through.

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