Secret Language of Color: Science, Nature, History, Culture, Beauty of Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, & Violet - Hardcover

Eckstut, Joann; Eckstut, Arielle

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1579129498 ISBN 13: 9781579129491

Verlag: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

The Secret Language of Color celebrates and illuminates the countless ways in which color colors our world.

Why is the sky blue, the grass green, a rose red? Most of us have no idea how to answer these questions, nor are we aware that color pervades nearly all aspects of life, from the subatomic realm and the natural world to human culture and psychology.

Organized into chapters that begin with a fascinating explanation of the physics and chemistry of color, The Secret Language of Color imparts a beautiful and thorough investigation into the nature of color, such as how and why we see color, rainbows, animals with color vision far superior and inferior to our own, how our language influences the colors we see, and much more. Between these chapters, authors Joann Eckstut and Ariele Eckstut turn their attention to the individual hues of the visible spectrum -- red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violent -- presenting each in fascinating, in-depth detail.

Including hundreds of stunning photographs and dozens of informative and entertaining graphics, every page is a breathtaking demonstration of color and its role in the world around us. Whether you see red, are a shrinking violet, or talk a blue streak, this is the perfect book for anyone interested in the history, science, culture, and beauty of color in the natural and man-made world.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joann Eckstut is a leading color consultant who works with a wide range of professionals including architects, developers, and manufacturers of name brands. She is founder of The Roomworks, a prominent NYC interior design firm and is one of twelve designers chosen by the Color Association of the United States to create the yearly interior/environmental forecast that is bought by major industries to keep up with color trends. She is the author of Room Redux: The Home Decorating Workbook and The Color Palette Primer: A Guide to Choosing Ideal Color Combinations for Your Home. She lives in Rensselaerville, New York.

Arielle Eckstut is the author of eight books including The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published. She is co-founder of The Book Doctors with her husband David Henry Sterry, a company dedicated to helping writers successfully publish their books. She is also co-founder of the iconic company, LittleMissMatched, which has become a national brand with stores all over the United States including Disneyland, Disney World, and Fifth Avenue in New York City. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

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THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF COLOR

SCIENCE, NATURE, HISTORY, CULTURE, BEAUTY OF RED, ORANGE, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE & VIOLET

By JOANN ECKSTUT, ARIELLE ECKSTUT

BLACK DOG AND LEVENTHAL PUBLISHERS, INC.

Copyright © 2013 JOANN ECKSTUT AND ARIELLE ECKSTUT
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-57912-949-1

Contents

PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY, 10, 
RED, 36, 
UNIVERSE, 48, 
ORANGE, 70, 
EARTH, 84, 
YELLOW, 106, 
PLANTS, 120, 
GREEN, 144, 
ANIMALS, 158, 
BLUE, 182, 
HUMANS, 196, 
VIOLET, 220, 

CHAPTER 1

PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY

Plato, Newton, Da Vinci, Goethe, Einstein: All these great minds and many more grappled with the profound complexity of color. They sought to understand it, creating systems to explain its mysterious workings.

Some fared better than others, and from the vantage point of our current scientific knowledge, many of their attempts now seem funny, bizarre, or downright fantastic. In the fifth century BC, Plato drew a causal relationship between color vision and the tears in our eyes. The eighteenth—and nineteenth-century philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe tried to impose order on color's chaos by arranging hues into three groups: powerful, gentle/soft, and radiant/splendid. Although we've come a long way in our understanding of color, much remains a mystery.

Color is everywhere, but most of us never think to ask about its origins. The average person has no idea why the sky is blue, the grass green, the rose red. We take such things for granted. But the sky is not blue, the grass is not green, the rose is not red. It has taken us centuries to figure this out.

In a very dark chamber, at a round hole, about one-third part of an inch broad, made in the shut of a window. I placed a glass prism, whereby the beam of the Sun's light, which came in that hole, might be refracted upwards toward the opposite wall of the chamber, and there form a colored image of the sun.

—Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks

It stands to reason that for thousands of years, many casual observers must have seen what Newton did: that light passing through a prism creates a rainbow on the surface where it lands; but Newton saw something no one else had seen. He deduced that the white light that appears to surround us actually contains all the different colors we find in a rainbow. White was not separate from these colors—or a color unto itself—but was the result of all colors being reflected at once. This counterintuitive and revolutionary theory did not take hold easily. Some of those greatest minds we mentioned simply wouldn't accept this theory. The idea that white light contained all color upset Goethe so that he refused—and demanded others refuse—even to attempt Newton's experiment.

NEWTON'S PRISM Although Newton's discovery was more than enough to upset his contemporaries' digestion, he didn't stop there; Newton also ascertained that colors refracted through a prism could not be changed into other colors. Here's how he did it. He took a prism and placed it between a beam of light (coming from the hole in his window shutters) and a board with a small hole in it. The hole in the board was small enough that it only allowed one of the refracted colors to pass through it. He then placed all kinds of materials (including a second prism) in front of the beam passing through the small hole to try to alter the refracted color passing through the small hole. Prior to the experiment, he had believed that if, for example, a blue piece of glass was placed in front of a red beam of light, the red would be transformed into another color. But he found that this was not the case. No matter what color or type of material he placed in front of an individual beam of light, he couldn't get the refracted color to change. From this experiment, he deduced that there was a certain number of what he called "spectral" colors—colors that cannot be broken down, colors that are fundamental.

Once Newton confirmed that his spectral colors were unchangeable, he decided to name them—and here's where his method takes a left turn from the scientific to the fanciful. Taken with the idea that the rainbow should reflect the musical scale, Newton decided to name his colors in accordance with aesthetics. There are seven main tones in the musical scale, so Newton came up with seven corresponding colors. Hence the origin of ROYGBIV, the acronym by which we know Newton's seven spectral colors—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Although the relationship to music was later set aside by scientists who questioned the basis for comparison, ROYGBIV is still used today as a teaching tool, even though indigo is not a color most people can even identify.

The truth is, there's no perfect way to name the colors of the rainbow. Take a look at a real rainbow (as opposed to a kindergartner's felt-tip rendition), and you'll see that its colors merge seamlessly from one to the other. Any judgment on where one color ends and the other begins is arbitrary. Even Newton waffled on this point. At the beginning of his experimentation, his spectrum included eleven colors. Once he'd whittled the number down to seven, he still thought of orange and indigo as less important, calling them semitones in another nod to the musical scale.

There's another issue with naming the colors of the rainbow: The language of color is fluid, morphing over time and across geographies in response to cultural forces that are sometimes too complex to pin down. For example, the color Newton called indigo is the one most people would identify as plain old blue or a true blue that falls midway between green and violet. Newton's blue is what we now call cyan, a more turquoise blue that falls between blue and green.

As for the name of the last color in the rainbow, why is it violet as opposed to purple? Violet refers to the spectral color that looks bluish purple. Purple refers not to a spectral color but to a color created by a mix of light.

Color systems pre-and post-Newton have codified a whole host of fundamental colors. By fundamental, we mean colors that our linguistic or scientific models don't allow us to reduce any further. Today, if you were asked to categorize the color navy, you would probably call it a dark blue. If forced to generalize it even further, you would just say it's a shade of blue, but there's nowhere to go from there. Throughout history, our cultural understanding of fundamental colors has shifted dramatically, ranging from the stark black and white model (where colors were categorized merely by how dark or light they were) to systems made up of dozens of colors, to systems in which some combination of red, yellow, blue, green, and sometimes orange and violet/purple typically reigns.

Today, we consider red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet as fundamental. These fundamental colors are referred to as hues. Although a color's value (put simply, how dark or light it is) and its chroma (put simply, how dull or bright it is) can change, its hue is essential to its identification.

Regardless of their number, the colors Newton called spectral should not be confused with the colors we've been taught are the primary colors that cannot be mixed and are therefore fundamental (i.e., red, blue, and yellow) or the class of shades known as secondary colors (i.e. orange, green, and purple). These secondary colors, we've been taught, result from the mixing of the primary colors—red and yellow make orange, red and blue make purple, and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Black Dog & Leventhal
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1579129498
• ISBN 13: 9781579129491
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Hachette Ireland, Hachette UK; info@hbgi.ie; ; Castlecourt Centre 8; Dublin 15; D15 XTP3; Irland