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A review by orangejenny
Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay
3.0
This was a struggle to get through, yet I ended up being a fan of it, as much of the author's style as of the content. I read it on a trip, without other reading material available, and doubt I'd have gotten through it otherwise. The author tries to foreshadow and to pull different stories together with endless introductions along the lines of, "Who knew that my search for purple would involve a French aristocrat, a humble mollusk, and a pair of star-crossed lovers?" This doesn't work especially well, but with a subject as broad as color, it's difficult to blame the author for the lack of narrative. Each chapter is dedicated to a color, working through the rainbow from red to violet, which is as good a way as any to categorize the content. Within each chapter, the facts, theories, and stories are a mishmash of people, places, and eras. The lack of connection between one chapter (or page) and the next made the book quite difficult to get into.
A good deal of the book describes the author's own experiences traveling to research color. It's not clear when all of them took places, but they cover enough ground that I'm guessing that they took quite some time and that some were not directly for the purpose of this book but were earlier trips inspired by the author's personal interest in the subject. The blue chapter's story of her traveling to Afghanistan...in 2001...for the sake of seeing in person what are, essentially, blue rocks, was about where I decided that she's unhealthily fixated on this subject, but that I could appreciate her obsession. Her references to home experiments with dyes and pigments (who knew how many colors involve urine in the production?) had a similar effect. I grew to imagine her as a journalist handling her assignments while squeezing in side trips to seek out mango-leaf-eating cows or cochineal insects, toting around a bag of color-related notes and paraphernalia, smelling faintly of, well, pee.
If there's a theme to the book, it's the physical work and limitations involved in making art, particularly in different eras. I didn't know anything about challenges like how few natural ways we have to produce green, or that creating a dye isn't the same thing as creating a pigment. It hadn't occurred to me that painters couldn't effectively work outdoors until they had a reliable way to cart around their paints and keep them from drying up (that is, when metal tubes of paint replaced animal bladders). I understand that old paintings may have faded, but didn't understand that different colors fade differently, and that fading might also involve changing hue. So beyond the many individual facts and stories, most of which I will forget, this is a good introduction to art(ist) appreciation.
A good deal of the book describes the author's own experiences traveling to research color. It's not clear when all of them took places, but they cover enough ground that I'm guessing that they took quite some time and that some were not directly for the purpose of this book but were earlier trips inspired by the author's personal interest in the subject. The blue chapter's story of her traveling to Afghanistan...in 2001...for the sake of seeing in person what are, essentially, blue rocks, was about where I decided that she's unhealthily fixated on this subject, but that I could appreciate her obsession. Her references to home experiments with dyes and pigments (who knew how many colors involve urine in the production?) had a similar effect. I grew to imagine her as a journalist handling her assignments while squeezing in side trips to seek out mango-leaf-eating cows or cochineal insects, toting around a bag of color-related notes and paraphernalia, smelling faintly of, well, pee.
If there's a theme to the book, it's the physical work and limitations involved in making art, particularly in different eras. I didn't know anything about challenges like how few natural ways we have to produce green, or that creating a dye isn't the same thing as creating a pigment. It hadn't occurred to me that painters couldn't effectively work outdoors until they had a reliable way to cart around their paints and keep them from drying up (that is, when metal tubes of paint replaced animal bladders). I understand that old paintings may have faded, but didn't understand that different colors fade differently, and that fading might also involve changing hue. So beyond the many individual facts and stories, most of which I will forget, this is a good introduction to art(ist) appreciation.