The Theory & Practice of Revealing Color

PREFACE

Arranging color as a collection of associations and experiments brings attention to the scientific nature of Isaac Newton’s color theory. Newton proved that white light was not simple; it was a mixture of rays which a prism was able to separate. Objects appear a certain color because of how they reflect light, rather than color being an inherent property of an object. The prism doesn’t create colors, it reveals them.

We perceive colors through the human lens: we select and separate, associate and remember.

In this small collection, Newton’s seven hues: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet are allied with individual perceptions of color — the person becomes the prism.

II ORANGE

There was once a boy named Barrett Elkins and he proclaimed that his favorite color was orange. Classmates and teachers began to associate the color with Barrett, and orange became a sort of novelty for him. He received gifts on a daily basis — an orange scarf, orange shoe laces. He had a peculiar and witty sense of humor which could stand on its own — without all this orange — yet somehow he relied on the loud brass color to demand attention.

Since color cannot be weighed or measured, we label colors with words, with associations.

Color is expression and orange is mighty, enthusiastic, vibrant, forceful, exuberant, and enlivining.

IV GREEN

James Gleick’s Isaac Newton “sought order and believed in order but never averted his eyes from the chaos.”

Green is traditionally the color of trees and leaves and mother earth, of nature’s patterned order. But green is also an answer to chaos, a way of individually being responsible for and respectful of our very finite resources. Green is riding a bicycle, carrying a big basket, vegetables with roots in tact, green is good luck and stitched pants, green is a homemade meal.

VI INDIGO

The human eye is relatively insensitive to hue changes in the wavelengths between blue and violet — the lines are blurred. At age nineteen, Isaac Newton wrote down a list of his sins. No. 12: Threatening my father and mother to burne them and the house over them. No. 14 reads: Wishing death and hoping it to some.

The lines between genius and madman, scientist and poet were blurred: “I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Like Isaac, indigo is contemplative, solitary, confusing, dignified and organic. Indigo is a sky of stars, the tumultuous sea, a fortune told.