We receive the world in color, and to be re-attuned to it is to see the world anew. In Color Scheme: An Irreverent History of Art and Pop Culture in Color Palettes, published last fall, Edith Young offers a playful tour of the exact shades of color appearing in a variety of art and pop culture creations through paint-chip-style grids of color.
From slight color variations in the blush on the cheeks of Marie Antoinette across portraits by numerous artists, to the wildly changing hue of Dennis Rodman’s hair dye over the course of his NBA career (which takes no fewer than 40 panels), Young’s cheerfully eccentric choices give us new eyes for their subjects. And where else could you compare the sixteen blue-gray and blue-green shades of the blue bills in John James Audubon’s bird portraits with the soft blues and blue-violets of the mountaintops in the dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History, over and against sixteen shockingly intense blues of David Hockney’s pools?
Young’s written commentary on the project, its impetus, and the uses of color is no less interesting. She quotes a passage from Diana Vreeland’s autobiography that helped launch Young on the meticulous exploration of color variants while a student at Rhode Island School of Design: “All my life I’ve pursued the perfect red. I can never get painters to mix it for me. It’s exactly as if I’d said, ‘I want Rococo with a spot of Gothic in it and a bit of Buddhist temple’--they have no idea what I’m talking about. About the best red is to copy the color of a child’s cap in any Renaissance portrait.” Young notes of this statement that it is “inexact and somewhat ludicrous, though somehow charming and true, all at once.” This in fact becomes her first palette–the reds of the red caps in Renaissance portraits–as a kind of visual commentary on the absurdity and evocativeness of Vreeland’s idea (and a bewitching assortment of reds it is).
Perusing these charts—of the vibrant colors of Spike Lee’s eyeglasses, the unpleasantly greenish flesh tones of Lucien Freud’s portraits of his ex-wives, or the fantastic yellows and purples of Prince’s concert outfits—we see the truth of Young’s assertion that “to be awash in a palette feels like taking a micro-vacation to a new color scheme,” that it is “a reminder of the infinite possibilities afoot.” (For the color-obsessed, she provides the exact CMYK values for each color in the book.)
For those hungry for color in nature (and who among us is not, in the gray months around the next corner or two?), pair Young’s book with the gorgeously produced Nature’s Palette: A Color Reference System from the Natural World by Patrick Baty, also published last year. This lavishly illustrated work sources precise colors with more than 1,000 color images of minerals, birds’ eggs, butterflies, and flowers.
Between them—spanning nature and culture—these books give a new sense of wonder to our perception of the world around us.
Jared is an adult services librarian at the Howe Library in Hanover. He purchases a range of nonfiction for the library and conspires with a colleague to devise the library’s programming. When otherwise free, he’s usually in the mountains, swimming in local ponds and rivers, trying his hand at new cuisines, reading, or dreaming of walking the Scottish Highlands.