Personal Updates & Curiosities

Some personal notes to keep in mind while reading this brief newsletter issue:

I. a. Today is my 44th birthday.
b. 44 falls squarely in the realm of the "middle-aged", or medieval (through French from the Latin meaning "middle age").
II. a. After nearly 5 years here, I will be leaving Chicago by the end of June.
b. For those interested, I having been working on a "End of Chicago Residency" show, which will be held at my apartment during the second weekend of June.
c. I've spent the past few months playing with handcutting colored acrylic sheets. The result is using this new medium to recreate or reimagine preexisting works, ideas, and research I did during my time in Chicago, and a full catalog will be available online soon.
d. To that end, I've been largely focused this month on finishing this collection, which is a coda to my time in Chicago, and packing up my apartment. As such, most of my active research topics are on hold until after I move out.
e. I don't know exactly what my next step will be.

Colorful Curiosity

I've said many times that, at its core, Colorphilia is about curiosity. The journey is the purpose, and I never know where it's going to end when I begin.

During the course of my research, I've discovered fascinating people, periods, and uses of colors that we generally take for granted or miss their significance. While this is a non-exhaustive list, it is a sampling of topics I've researched or am researching, or ideas which pique my interest in one way or another.

Meaning

A color's meaning and connotation evolves and expands over time, and why the past may inform the present meaning, it does not dictate it. But to understand the past, and how they understood the colors in the world around them, we have to understand how those pigments and hues came to be.

Individuals

I've been fascinated by tracing the intellectual history of perceptions of color, from the scientific studies of Sir Isaac Newton in his 1704 Opticks (at age 61), to the rationality of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1810 Theory of Colors (at age 62), to Michel Eugène Chevreul's 1839 initial published research on functional color in The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours (at age 52), to Josef Albers' 1963 Interaction of Color (at age 75) of teaching color through experimentation and play.

I mention these four people, because it can argued that while their resulting color theory changed how people would subsequently view and use color, each one was well-known in another discipline before ever turning their focus to color theory. Each of them brought in their prior knowledge, processes, and biases to their study of color theory. Of them, Albers was the only one who actively used color as a designer and artist.

It's almost as if each of these scholars used color as an additional lens on whatever they were doing, as opposed to starting out by seeking unfettered usage of color.

This is not to ignore the scores of other scholars who taxonomized, catalogued, researched, and experimented with color, perception, cognition, philosophy, and meaning. Or the countless artists who played with color as a matter of practice.

Periods

I've written a lot about both the infatuation or obsession with color during the middle decades of the 17th, 19th and 20th centuries. In each instance, they had access to new pigments and materials which allowed them to experiment and understand color. Color was used as a modifier to reimagine what more could be possible. The more personal color became, the more it would be connected to personality and identity.

There is a lot to be written about shift from the color palette of the 1950s, through the 1960s, 1970s and to the 1980s, but that is a larger piece for a different time.

(Secret) Social Signaling

Color has been used for the semiotics using handkerchiefs and other items from 18th century France and on, from the friendly and romantic to the downright prurient. Whether it was using a certain color ink, or wearing a certain item, which would telegraph to members of your own group something no one would else notice or discern. The color was an additional layer of information.

Flags, Symbols, Uniforms and Social Identities

From the porphyrogenitus (or "born to the purple") and laws restricting color usage to certain classes in Rome, to the colorful factions during Nika Riots in Byzantium, to the War of the Roses, to medieval heraldry, ribbons, and flags, to sumptuary laws in Edo Japan, to sports teams and political parties, to the ever-expanding LGBTQIA+ rainbow and derivations or swatches thereof, color was used to differentiate between families, classes, and social groups.

Feel free to respond with color-related ideas that you are curious about.