any color you like …

I’ve been reading a lot about the symbolic meaning of color lately, but what do seeing color really looks like?

Green Parsley, Gelatin Silver Print, 2010 [from "Any Color You Like"] © Matthew Gamber

North American Birds Exhibit, Gelatin Silver Print, 2010 [FROM "ANY COLOR YOU LIKE"] © MATTHEW GAMBER

These beautiful images by Matthew Gamber made me think of Oliver Sacks and The of Case of the Color-blind Painter. In The Case …, Oliver Sacks describes a man who, as a result of a car accident, suffered an unusual condition. Mr. I, as Sacks calls him, described his symptoms as:

My vision was such that everything appeared to me as a black and white television screen … my vision became that of an eagle – I can see a worm wiggling a block away. The sharpness of focus is incredible. But – I AM TOTALLY COLOUR-BLIND.

 

When Mr I ‘saw’ colors as shades of grey he felt uncomfortable because he knew he was not seeing “real black and white”. Mr I had developed a very strange condition, and it was not at al like any kind of “ordinary” color-blindness.

Green Bananas, Gelatin Silver Print, 2010 [FROM "ANY COLOR YOU LIKE"] © MATTHEW GAMBER

One morning while driving (by now he had learnt to recognise stop lights by location and not color!) he saw the sun rise. He realised the blazing reds had all turned to black “like a bomb, like some enormous nuclear explosion”. It dawned on him that no one had ever seen a sun rise in this way before. In that moment, Mr. I was inspired to start painting again; this time in black and white. Over the next few months he worked 15-18 hours a day producing dozens of paintings in a style and with a character he had never shown before.

Further tests showed that Mr I perceived color by seeing tones of grey to a degree unknown by normally sighted or congenitally color-blind people. How was he able to do this?

Recent research into visual perception has revealed that color recognition requires a minimum of three sub-systems to be functioning: Physical receptors (ie. the cones in the eyes); wavelenght-sensitive cells (apparently located in an area of the brain known as V1); and a higher order color-generating mechanism (located in the V4 region). These three process need to work in harmony to yield the perception of color.

Tests revealed that for Mr I, the higher order color-generating mechanism was not functioning. However the other two processes were operating perfectly. Mr I was able to recognise variations in color by the comparative wavelength of the reflected light without being able to see color!

His brain damage had made him privy to, indeed trapped him within, a strange in-between state – the uncanny world of V1 – a world of anomalous and, so to speak, prechromatic sensation, which could not be categorised as either coloured or colourless.

 

… a world of anomalous and, so to speak, prechromatic sensation, which could not be categorised as either colored or colorless … makes you wonder, doesn’t it?!

So: what do seeing color really looks like?

Thank you Michelle – for leading way to the truly interesting world of Matthew Gamber.

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Matthew Gamber is a Boston-based artist with degrees from Bowling Green State University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts / Tufts University

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How come blue is the color of melancholy?

 Today my study of Bluets has led me home -

Edvard Munch, Melankoli (Melancholy), oil on canvas, 1892 © National Gallery, Oslo

As with many of Edvard Munch‘s works, “Melancholy” appears in several different versions and techniques. (His repeated use of the same concepts has made it difficult to identify some works due to the lack of precise descriptions). The “Melancholy” composition began as a pastel drawing of 1891, and was painted between 1891 and 1892 (in painting the compositions are also known as “The Yellow Boat”, “Evening“ and “Jealousy“) . A first woodcut version made in 1896 had the foreground figure on the left, and only the faintest indication of the figures on the pier.

The main figure is said to represent the writer Jappe Nielsen, who suffers for his hopeless love of Oda Krogh, pictured with her newly-married husband, Christian, on the pier.

Oda with friend and lover, the poet Jappe Nilssen in 1891

http://www.moma.org/audios/embed/26/589

EDVARD MUNCH, MELANKOLI (MELANCHOLY), woodcut, 1901 © MUNCH museum, OSLO

The melancholy seen in the pictures of Munch seems to be rather grave, and to me Jappe Nilssen looks more than sad. But traditionally there is a difference between melancholy and depression. Wordsworth put it like this: Melancholy (…) is a luxurious gloom, of choice. According to Jacky Bowring, unlike depression we choose to be melancholic, paradoxically deriving pleasure from feeling faintly sad.

I wonder what’s the case in Bluets,

is feeling blue a kind of choice?

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There would seem to be a lesson here, but I am not prepared to describe it -

While writing a book, I’m influenced by things the same way I would imagine most writers are: I look for what I want to steal, then I steal it, and make my own weird stew of the goods

- Maggie Nelson

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writing Bluets

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ludwig wittgenstein (1889 – 1951)

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afternoon walk

This is what I saw

100 kroner (€ 13 - $ 17) swimming in the sea

a wrecked shopping cart

an unfriendly danger-sign

a viciously laughing dinosaur

a life buoy someone forgot to use

at times even a clear-cut meaning may slip through

She (Szymborska) is preoccupied … throughout her work, with the relationship between poetry and the daily life that surrounds it, feeds it, and at times altogether ignores it.

- Clare Cavanagh

Yesterday I got this challenging question regarding Szymborska: ”How does the writing–or reading, affect you?”

I’m still pondering about it. Sometimes art hits you somewhere behind logics and it takes time to find adequate words to describe what has happened. 

While I’m looking for words you might enjoy having a look at this:

Journal, Day One : Clare Cavanagh : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation.

I will also strongly  recommend a visit to The Dad Poet‘s fine post on Szymborska.

Clouds

I’d have to be really quick
to describe clouds -
a split second’s enough
for them to start being something else.

Their trademark:
they don’t repeat a single
shape, shade, pose, arrangement.

Unburdened by memory of any kind,
they float easily over the facts.

What on earth could they bear witness to?
They scatter whenever something happens.

Compared to clouds,
life rests on solid ground,
practically permanent, almost eternal.

Next to clouds
even a stone seems like a brother,
someone you can trust,
while they’re just distant, flighty cousins.

Let people exist if they want,
and then die, one after another:
clouds simply don’t care
what they’re up to
down there.

And so their haughty fleet
cruises smoothly over your whole life
and mine, still incomplete.

They aren’t obliged to vanish when we’re gone.
They don’t have to be seen while sailing on.

- Wislawa Szymborska

translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

I want to die painting – (among myriad triumphs of blueness)

In her book; Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter, Patricia Albers tells us:

Rilke looked to painting, especially Cézanne’s, as a model for poetry. In late 1907, the writer visited the Paris Salon d’Automne nearly every day, seeking to memorize the work of the Post-Impressionist, whose discipline, nuance, precision, and chromatic emotion he emulated. Having visually devoured the blues that dominate Cézanne’s late work, Rilke wrote, in Letters on Cézanne (another Joan favorite), of “an ancient Egyptian shadow blue” seen while crossing the Place de la Concorde, of the “wet dark blue” in a certain van Gogh, of the “hermetic blue” of a Rodin watercolor, of “the dense waxy blue of the Pompeiian wall paintings,” and of “a kind of thunderstorm blue” in a work by the Master of Aix- fabulous stuff for the future painter of Hudson River Day Line, Blue Territory, and La Grande Vallée, among myriad triumphs of blueness.

PAUL CÉZANNE (1839-1906) Le Chateau Noir 1900-1904
OIL ON CANVAS © national gallery of art, washington

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Today I went to see his pictures again . . . one feels their presence drawing together into a colossal reality. As if these colors could heal one of indecision once and for all. The good conscience of these reds, these blues, their simple truthfulness, it educates you . . . 

(Rilke, Letters on Cézanne)

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) Still Life with Onions 1896-1898
Oil on canvas © RMN (Musée d’Orsay)

I want to die painting

- Paul Cézanne

Absolute fabulous stuff, also for the future painter of Hudson River Day Line, Blue Territory, and La Grande Vallée; Joan Mitchell

Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) Blue Territory 1972

OIL ON CANVAS © albright-knox gallery

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When I am working, I am only aware of the canvas and what it tells me to do. I am certainly not aware of myself. Painting is a way of forgetting oneself. Sometimes I am totally involved. It’s like riding a bicycle with no hands. I call that state ‘no hands.’ I am in it. I am not there any more. It is a state of non-self-consciousness. It does not happen often. I am always hoping it might happen again. 

- Joan Mitchell 

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murmuration

While I’m writing, you can enjoy this:

They call it a murmuration because witnessing it will make your heart skip a beat…

recommended by Sean

and what about Experimenting with Nonhuman Forms - wouldn’t it be fun?

Blue in itself

YVES KLEIN: IKB 79 (1959), PAINT ON CANVAS ON PLYWOOD

IKB 79 is one of nearly two hundred blue monochrome paintings made by Yves Klein. Klein began making monochromes in 1947, considering them to be a way of rejecting the idea of representation in painting and therefore of attaining creative freedom.

The letters IKB stand for International Klein Blue, a distinctive ultramarine which Klein registered as a trademark colour in 1957. He considered that this colour had a quality close to pure space and he associated it with immaterial values beyond what can be seen or touched.

But blue is not necessarily a tranquil color, it can also, as Klein beautifully showed us, convey great trouble and distress – chaos:

YVES KLEIN: ANT 76, Grande Anthropophagie bleue Hommage à Tennessee Williams (1960), Paper mounted onto canvas

The curators at the Centre Pompidou says:

the Grande Anthropophagie bleue. Hommage a Tennessee Williams (1960) is a reflection of the fragility and suffering of the flesh. It is an appropriation of the final scene of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer, the work can be seen as an expression of great violence by the chaos and force of its marks. 

In the play, the protagonist is the victim of nightmarish punishment with makeshift weapons inflicted upon him by the young boys he abused. Through the heroin, a young woman played by Elizabeth Taylor, who witnessed the scene, we learn that jagged tin cans were used to rip up his body into strips. Klein takes up this theme under the no less violent title of anthropophagy to evoke a world that combines flesh and blood, guilt and penitence, weakness and strength of the body capable of suffering and inflicting suffering in return.

This Anthropophagy is blue: it recalls the ambivalence of the flesh, at once earthly and spiritual, the bearer of physical and moral suffering, mortal and eternal and, if one follows the artist’s theory of incarnation, verging on the Christian resurrection of the body. 

The Floating House

- rediscovering blueness; in all its strange and wonderful variations.

Paulette Phillips, The Floating House, 2002. Video still from the 16mm film.

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Paulette Phillips made a beautiful video of a house adrift on the Atlantic Ocean, a house which slowly gets pulled under by the force of the sea. The film has a very interesting soundtrack, contrasting the emptiness in the pictures:

http://paulette-phillips.ca/The_Floating_House.html

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measuring blueness

Delving into Blue(ts)

Today I have been reading about cyanometry and the cyanometer.

CYANOMETRY: The study and measurement of the blueness of light; the measurement of intensity of blue light, especially of the blue of the sky.

The cyanometer is attributed to Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (1740–99), a Swiss physicist and geologist, famous for his studies of the geology, meteorology, and botany of the mountainous regions of Europe, particularly the Alps.

The cyanometer had 53 sections, ranging from white to varying shades of blue (dyed with Prussian blue) and then to black, arranged in a circle. The color circle can be compared to any area of sky.The original instructions specified that the observer face to the north. de Saussure himself used the device to measure the color of the sky at Geneva, Chamonix and Mont Blanc. He concluded, correctly, that the color of the sky was dependent on the amount of suspended particles in the atmosphere.

ps:

WHY IS THE SKY BLUE?

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