Reddit reviews Color: A Natural History of the Palette

Here you go, ladies.

Pegging. Thoughts?

• No thank you. Even if he asked for it, I’d be worried about doing him an injury by mistake. Not a sexy feeling.
  
  
  How old were you when you lost your virginity?
  
  
• 15.
  
  
  If you could change it, would you make it earlier or later?
  
  
• The date is less relevant than the individual I chose. I’d change the person.
  
  
  Do you like using toys in the bedroom?
  
  
• On my own, yes. Though much less often, now that I have the miracle of sexy audios. I prefer my hand.
  
  What is your go to song for when you are
  
  
• a) sad - Uno, Ludovico Einaudi
  
  
• b) contemplative - Gong Meditation
  
  
• c) happy - Get Lucky, Pharrell Williams. I associate it with walking into the Louvre in Paris.
  
  
• d) head over heels smitten - To each man his own song, but in the past I've swooned to Simply Beautiful (Al Green) and Keep Them Kisses Comin' (Craig Campbell)
  
  
  When was the last time you laughed a lovely laugh full of mirth?
  
  
  
• Last week. Something a friend said in response to another friend, that cracked me up. Extremely not-PC remarks about Easter between a Catholic and a Jew. The kind of thing only two very good friends could get away with riffing on.
  
  
  What is your favourite colour and what does it signify?
  
  
• All the colors. What I wear entirely depends on my mood and my whim. I'll admit my closet and drawers are color coded. For your reading pleasure, this is an excellent book about the origins of pigments; [Color: A Natural History of the Palette](https://www.amazon.com/Color-Natural-History-Victoria-Finlay/dp/0812971426/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0812971426&pd_rd_r=WPK9M49AJFY6BVCG98HN&pd_rd_w=cAyMT&pd_rd_wg=sySho&psc=1&refRID=WPK9M49AJFY6BVCG98HN
  ), by Victoria Finlay. It is well worth your time.
  
  
  And the SUNDAY SPECIAL for this week:
  Your favourite on screen villains/ vamps of all time...
  
  
• Total fail here, ladies. I got as far as whoever shot Bambi’s mother, the eponymous star of Alien, and was wondering if Hitler counts (because he is in so many movies) when I stalled out. Was pondering horrible characters, when I realized that if they are good at being villains I don’t like them, so the concept of having favorites doesn’t really work for me.
  
  
  
  

I have Color: A Natural History of the Palette which I find really interesting, it discusses color theory and the history behind it.

This is amazing. I would love to try to convince him he must be color blind or something, while insisting that black people are literally black, and white people are literally white, and he must be seeing something different. A spin-off of the classic mildly-stoned-deep-thought, “how do we know that what I call ‘red’ and what you call ‘red’ actually look the same? We only know what ‘red’ is because we’re taught certain things are ‘red’, like fire trucks and apples. Maybe color is a social construct!”

Which reminds me of a Radiolab podcast about color I heard a few months back, and the mystery of Homer’s “wine-dark sea”- supposedly there’s no mention of color blue in neither the Iliad or the Odyssey . Plus, is the sky really blue?

Now seems like a good time for me to finally read a book about the history of color that’s been on my Kindle for months. That Top Mind who just has apparently just discovered color has inspired me!

I bought this book for my painting teacher and he enjoyed it. All about the history of different pigments. Color: A Natural History of the Palette

Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay is a worldwide travelogue of pigments and dyes. Fascinating and fun, definitely my favorite painter book so far.

Color: A Natural History of the Palette
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0812971426/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_luiBDbGVMT8JQ

not to pile on... but...

in painting classes you're wrestling with things like the "four step method" that the classical painters used where you're creating washes and layers that influence how the light travels through the layers of paint... (that layer of dark black you laid down weeks ago becomes that dark corner in the room, while you're painting a completely different black to work out these shadows and details in the foreground... the light literally travels through the washes and bounces off of different paint layers...)

or attempting cubist techniques where with a limited palate you're mixing paints into low viscosity solutions that lend to slapping the canvas on the ground so they don't run. Or "attempting" "en plein air" impressionism, out-in-the-fields getting sunstroke, just trying to render shapes in the bold, slap-on-a-slab-of-paint with a brush or palate knife... You gain a new respect for those people you see actually out there with an easel and a canvas, out on the shore painting this weird, little thing that doesn't look quite right.

Impressionism was something I thought was a joke until I tried it in a field with actual paint. Same with Rembrandt's four step method or even some of, maybe especially some of the modern abstract stuff. You could spend months just learning about mixing paints.

With photography, I had taken thousands of digital photos but doing real, actual darkroom photography--seeing how the slightest error in timing and exposure completely changes the nature of the piece... One can be half decent at digital photography and absolutely hopeless with film photography. Digital cameras are small computers with apertures. Film cameras are tiny darkrooms where for a fraction of a second you expose light to a piece of plastic coasted with a particular chemical composition. And just to get that picture exposed it's an hour of dark room where you might just blow that whole roll with a simple noob error in the processing. A hair or spec of dust on the negative can get blown into the size of a thumb. Scratch one $5 piece of photo paper time time to spend ten minutes with a little air hose trying to remove the piece of hair.

anyhow...

It's sort of Dunning Kruger thinking that mastering photoshop = mastering photography and / or shop.

Dunno. I love our digital tools. (I don't exactly miss getting gassed by terpenoid fumes and how much time lost cleaning up or just taking care of brushes. )

Or being afraid of paint. Literally afraid of the lead in flake white or the metals in cadmium red being absorbed through the skin...

But on the flipside there's also something beautiful just in the lore of the colors alone. Lapis Lazuli from Afghanistan. Red from those little red bugs. Red ochre. Real deep red ochre is a color once squeezed onto a palate, one can fall in love with. The old, original cave paint.

Sidenote, great book: https://www.amazon.com/Color-Natural-History-Victoria-Finlay/dp/0812971426

I think this is maybe an argument over words and effort just as much as it's an old vs. new argument.

tl;dr. old, analogue art is hard / messy / expensive / complicated.