Hakone sakimidareru

咲き乱れる (click to enlarge; pink azaleas are completely out of gamut)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unique hues

Color does not exist in nature, it is an illusion happening in our mind. Therefore, we can not solve color appearance problems with physics alone. The situation gets even hairier when we converse about color, because color names are just an ephemeral convention. For example, it is easy to "synonimize" blue and cyan or red and magenta.

Especially the latter is not out of the blue. Back in the days when I was doing research in color science, I had an OSA-UCS atlas. Periodically, I was getting updates of color tiles. One tile was standing out: the one that Boynton and Olson had determined to be the best red, with coordinates (L, j, g) = (–3.6, 1.5, –6.9), representing the consensus for the basic color term "red." Not only was it changing, but is was changing frequently. When I lined the updates up in the light-booth, the best red was shifting towards magenta.

I was so puzzled about the OSA changing the tile for the best red, that I called them up. I found out that they periodically where getting new tiles from their supplier Dupont when they developed new pigments. The OSA would then scale them visually and emit updates to the atlas. Therefore, the shift of basic red was a sign that industry was getting better at creating what humans consider to be the best red, and the hue was shifting from yellow towards magenta.

This indicates that the above synonymity is not arbitrary.

Art teachers are the ones most victimized by the non physicality of color, especially when they have to teach the difference between additive and subtractive color, as I wrote in "Is it turquoise + fuchsia = purple or is it turquoise + fuchsia = blue?" a few years ago. Recently I received the following question: do you have any ideas as to how I can prove that red, green, yellow and blue are the unique hues?

It is not that Goethe's yellow-red-blue (today we would write yellow-magenta-cyan) primary theory is wrong. His 1810 Farbenlehre and his battle against Newton with the theory of red-green-blue primaries was a little weird, especially considering Newton (1642–1727) had long been dead when Goethe started fighting against him.

Go back to the 1470s in Florence. The 1453 collapse of the Roman Empire of the Orient (Byzantium) had generated an influx of scientists fleeing from Constantinople to Venice, who took along their over 1500 year old libraries. Aldo Manuzio, exploited this trove of works and cheap scientists to create the new profession of "publisher" and popularized this knowledge that had gone lost in the west. This lead to the Renaissance in Italy, which essentially consisted in taking a field, studying all books about it, and formulating a theory about this field, which can be used to apply it over and over. An example was Niccolò Machiavelli studying politics and creating the field of political science.

At that time, somebody we would now call "engineer" did not go to study at a university but to a place called a "bottega" or "workshop" in English. One of the most famous ones in Florence at that time was the Bottega del Verrocchio, run by Andrea di Michele di Francesco de' Cioni. Verrocchio was his nickname and can be translated as "true eye."

In the pictorial arts, at that time the hot trend was to use very vivid colors and to try to reproduce reality as faithfully as possible. In Verrocchio's bottega, students would learn about pigments and binders and research the creation of new paints to realize highly vivid colors.

One of these students was a lad from the village of Vinci, called Leonardo. Leonardo was passionate about this quest for realism and would dissect cadavers at the hospital to learn how muscles and tendons worked anatomically. For color, he invented a new method to analyze a scene consisting in viewing it through a series of stained glasses (a common novelty in the street markets of the 1470s). Today we would call this a spectroradiometer.

From his studies, Leonardo da Vinci formed a new theory that color is not a physical quality mastered by studying pigment admixtures, rather it is a new phenomenon he called "perception." Perception is the capacity to have a sensate or sentient experience, what philosophers call quale (the plural is qualia). Quale is what something feels like; for example, the smell of a rose or the taste of wine as specific sensations or feelings. We experience the world through qualia, but qualia are not patterns of bits in memory, far from it.

From this he developed a methodology to paint the light illuminating a scene instead of the scene itself. The technique he developed was to paint in many layers with very little pigment. He called this technique "sfumato" and the result "sfumatura."

Working with the spectroradiometer, he realized that colors are not a discrete set with the names of pigments. Rather it was a set of opponents. Doing his drawings he realized, that white and black are actually colors (in 1475 they were not considered to be colors) and they are opposites he called "chiaro" and "scuro", resulting into a technique he called "chiaroscuro."

Once you realize colors are not related to pigments, you have to come up with a representation based on perception. This is where language comes in. When describing a color in 1475, you would say for example "this color is a vermilion with a hint of lapislazzuli" to describe a certain pink. So in 1475 the primary colors were the pure pigments, like oltremare (lapislazzuli), azzurro (azzurrite), indaco, tornasole, vermilion, gold, etc.

Some pigments like lapislazzuli were very expensive and others like azzurrite were more affordable. Admixture would allow you to obtain a given color with a cheaper paint that elicits the same perception. Therefore, Leonardo concluded that the old naming scheme is not useful. To find a representation, he then set out to find if there are any perceived colors that you would never describe as an admixture of two or more colors. This lead him to red, green, yellow, blue, black and white, which are his unique hues.

Further, he discovered that you would never use descriptions like reddish green, bluish yellow, or dark white. This is what he called the "color opponent system" and allowed him to describe perceived color as points in a 3-dimensional space. This is the basis for CIELAB and for the NCS color atlas. For the Munsell color tree there is an extra step for purple.

With this you have the answer to the above question: you have to distinguish between the creation of color with colorants and the perception of color.

"The First Pass is Relatively Arbitrarily Picked Colors"

From the summer toPost folder is a hurl from Tim with a link to a Chuck Close interview on Colbert:





Which regardless of your opinion of Colbert, is a remarkable interview. First, Close gets Colbert to say toner. Second, Close describes paintings as "colored dirt on a flat surface". Third, Close checks his hand before revealing he suffers from prosopagnosia.

Violin Bow - with Color Interface

From the Cal Arts blog 24700 comes a post about students experimenting with instrumental interfaces as part of an exchange program. The description of the violin caught my eye:

"Haraldsdottir, a violist, and myself, a violinist, worked on building interfaces that incorporated an accelerometer and buttons with our bows. Haraldsdottir’s controls allowed for live looping and various audio effects, and my controls consisted of real-time alteration of filter effects and varied response of color intensity in RGB LEDs (lights)."




One wonders what they could have done with a gyroscope on the violin bow...

Chicken Broth + Streptomyces Spores = Blue

How cool is that, PLoS Biology has posted an article by L.K. Charkoudian, J.T. Fitzgerald, C. Khosla and A. Champlin entitled "In Living Color: Bacterial Pigments as an Untapped Resource in the Classroom and Beyond".



Turns out with some chicken broth (and some agar) you can use soil bacteria, like Streptomyces coelicolor, as a biopigment for all your educational and/or artistic projects.

For other research on biopigments, see "Biopigments from Monascus: strains selection, citrinin production and color stability" by J. Cesar de CarvalhoI, B.O. OishiI, A. PandeyII and C.R. Socco for color from fungi.

God's Goiter is Michelangelo's Brain

Artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were distinguished by their detailed understanding of anatomy; knowledge declared heretical by the Roman Catholic Church and therefore something that necessarily had to be acquired as a clandestine activity. Michelangelo even destroyed most of his anatomical sketches and notes. But not entirely. It seems that he hid some of them in plain sight of the Pope—on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Looking up and under at God's goiterous throat
Art historians have long been puzzled by certain subpar anatomical irregularities in Michelangelo’s work, e.g., the panel depicting The Separation of Light from Darkness shows a goiterous formation in God’s neck. Twenty years ago, it was suggested that the region belonging to God Creating Adam, in a central panel of the ceiling, was actually the human brain in cross section. Now, a paper in the May issue of Neurosurgery, identifies the "irregularity" in the Separation panel as an anatomically accurate depiction of the human brain, viz., spinal cord, brain stem, eyes and optic nerves.

Magnetic movie

Of course, we cannot see magnetic fields other than in the aurora borealis, that is why we have computer animation. Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor are two masters in the use of computer animations for visualizing phenomena.

Additive Color Mixing with 55,000 Pegs

From Joey Syta comes a unique Lite-Brite rendition of The Lady and the Unicorn entitled My Only Desire.



It's a nice use of additive color mixing and from the description of the piece:

"The pegs span four decades and multiple countries of origin which yield a much wider range of colors than the eight basic shades (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, and white)."

A great use of spatial color.

Which then contrasts nicely with an article in today's NYT about color palettes and the designer Hella Jongerius. The article includes the quote by Rolf Fehlbaum:

“Color is the least comprehensible aspect of design”

The article also notes that:

"Another problem, she says, is the influence of color forecasters, who tend to predict future trends (as their clients ask them to) rather than making considered decisions about individual colors, and how they will work together across a company’s products."

Which is to say spatial color is not just about the additive mixing of colors for the reproduction of a tapestry but multiple colors together is relevant for design.

The Darker Sides of Light & Color

The Darker Side of Light exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC will have it's final day on Monday the 18th.



The Dark Side of Color track of the Color Imaging XV: Displaying, Processing, Hardcopy, and Applications conference in San Jose will take place on Wednesday the 20th.

Next week will be a busy week for dark sides.

Beet Spectrum

From Tim comes a fun site rawcolor.com which includes a page on using cabbage, beet and pumpkin juice as colorants in an inkjet printer.



What fun! But why stop with some test prints - what exactly does the spectrum of a beet look like?

"The images always look better on the screen than on the page"

By way of follow-up to Neil's earlier post about Hockney's experimenting with inkjet printing is an NYRB article on Hockney's iPhone sketches.

Among other things he says: "the images always look better on the screen than on the page."



So I don't know but it might just be the difference between my screen and my print of his sketches but I'm not sure about always.

Objects Make Better Gifts

This weekend was Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco.



During a webcomics panel at least two of the panelists said one of the reasons they decided to try out publishing a webcomic was to be able to experiment with color in their comics.

Which is to say web color is still cheaper than printed color.

Inkjet Printer As a Paint Brush

Modern artist David Hockney, renowned for his portraiture, has been working more recently with computer-based tools like Photoshop and a Wacom tablet to create Inkjet-printed computer drawings on paper.

Leonardo Recognized by His Paw Print

The ghost-like fingerprint in the top left corner of an obscure portrait painting appears to have been confirmed as one of the most extraordinary art discoveries—the first da Vinci in 100 years. This TimesOnline article gives the background and includes a short video.

Listen as Peter Paul Biro, a Montreal-based forensic art expert, explains more about how he imaged the portrait with a specially developed multispectral camera. (WMV audio portion starts @ 00:14:12)

This modern episode is reminiscent of the image recognition of another famous author, through the application of special Swiss optical devices.

Oh Sonorous Imaging Devices

An HP ScanJet 5P performs the Ode to Joy:



While another ScanJet performs a Vivaldi piece:



And a printer plays Mary Had a Little Lamb:



Clearly DPI is only part of the picture.

Color Chart: Reinventing Color from 1950 to Today

Carinna Parraman wrote: "Check out the Internet version of the Color Chart exhibition at MOMA in NY, it is beautifully executed and certainly worth a visit."

Follow this link to MOMA to see what you can do with creativity, color, and Flash.

Blue citation from Carrie Mae Weems, Moody Blue Girl, 1988

This is not International Klein Blue

However, it is the color displayed on http://www.international-klein-blue.com/, so I guess the Web rendition of IKB is #002FA7. This is very far from the color specified by French artist Yves Klein (28 April 1928 - 6 June 1962). I once was in a room full of his paintings at the Kunsthaus in Zürich, and the effect was stunning. One trick was that these painting are correctly displayed by hanging them projecting out slightly from the wall, so that the canvasses appear to be suspended in space.

The ultramarine IKB paint is applied on the canvas with thick, highly textured strokes. Take the time to sit on a bench in front of a solid IKB painting, and the painting will hit you. The chromaticness is as high as it can get, and the few S-cones in your retina are contribuing to your visual system as they never have before. It will teach you, what the "deep" in "deep blue" means.

Klein started using IKB in 1958 and between 1960 and 1961 he created 15 monochrome IKB paintings. He developed IKB with chemists to achieve paint with the same chroma as dry pigment. This is done by suspending the pigment in a clear resin, and it allowed him to obtain the first patent (actually, just an enveloppe Soleau) for a color. As far as I know, IKB was never produced commercially.

Speaking of commerce, there is an interesting story about the first exhibition at the galleria Apollinaire in Milano. The eleven canvasses, although identical, were not appreciated equally by the public — they were sold for different prices. Klein concluded that each painting, as well as its material reality, was impregnated with an immaterial quality that made it distinct from the others.

And now I already see Nathan planning his next post, where he will not ask you to name colors, but to price them…