Category Archives: Colours

Turquoise

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PHOTO: Robyn Jay

Oh dear. So much for New Years’ Resolutions (see last post from, ahem, four months ago). Today I have just added another page from my archives (Turquoise) and made some private resolutions to do this better and more often. A reader wrote to me a couple of days ago asking if I had any photos of the textiles I wrote about in Colour, and whether I could put them on this blog. That thought did pass recently (and briefly) though my mind quite recently but then I realised they are all either slides or prints, which means they have to be scanned individually.

“Why on earth would you do slides and prints when you could take pictures in digital?” asked a young person in the office of the environment charity I work for, looking with total astonishment at the folders of slides as if they came from another century, which they almost do.

That said, in Chicago last month I saw, to my delight, some quipus (Inca message strings, dyed with cochineal and other dyes) and do have the pictures on my digital camera. So perhaps that will be a good start.

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Happy 2011

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New Year’s Resolutions… I might not make them every year but I certainly think about making them. The one New Year’s Resolution I’ve at least thought about making every year since I was six or seven (and saw a fabulous, tall American-looking woman step onto a curb and call a taxi with Panache with a capital P), is learning to wolf whistle. People have tried to show me over the years – there’s a trick with curling the tongue like a tube, apparently – but so far narry a piercing toot has come from me. Perhaps 2011 is that year.

I’ve had such nice feedback about this little blog (aka collection of random notes) that I might make a bit more of an effort in 2011 to find some emails I wrote to my lovely agent Simon while I was researching the colour book around the world, sitting in various internet cafes to tell him what I was up to. And I’ve also got a scanner now, so perhaps it’s time to put some of the photos up too. We had an intern for a few months at the charity I work at as communications director and I asked her a couple of months ago to scan some of their slides. “Why would you have slides,” she asked, looking puzzled as if she’d never seen one before, “when you could have done it digital?”

Oh, and 2011 is also the year that I’m going to concentrate on writing the first half (why stop at half?) of a story about Italy that I’ve been thinking about for the past four years.

Let this one at least not be like the New Years Resolutions I’ve ignored every year. Let “thinking about” be “acting on” too.

Happy New Year!

Pepys struggled with reading a book on Colours

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I have just received a lovely letter from Mr Kenneth Bone in Stirlingshire, telling me about one of his favourite quotations from Samuel Pepys’ Diary (Vol 2).

2nd June 1667 (Lords Day)

Being weary and almost blind with writing and reading so much today, I took boat and up the river all alone as high as Putney almost, and then back again, all the way reading and finishing Mr. Boyle’s book of Colours, which is so chemical that I can understand but little of it, but enough to see that he is a most excellent man.”

Pepys was talking about Robert Boyle’s Experiments on Colours, published in 1663, and Mr Bone wondered why I hadn’t mentioned it in my bibliography of Colour: Travels through the Paintbox. I’m ashamed to say that I hadn’t even found it, let alone struggled through the chemistry of it.

However since then, Gutenberg, that wonderful free library institution (for which I helped on the inputting of a couple of fantastic obscure books a few years ago, which I’d recommend to anyone who likes that kind of thing) has now put it online.

It starts with a short Preface, expressing a concern that I have some sympathy with:

Having in convenient places of the following Treatise, mention'd the
Motives, that induc'd me to write it, and the Scope I propos'd to my self
in it; I think it superfluous to entertain the Reader now, with what he
will meet with hereafter. And I should judge it needless, to trouble
others, or my self, with any thing of Preface: were it not that I can
scarce doubt, but this Book will fall into the hands of some Readers, who
being unacquainted with the difficulty of attempts of this nature, will
think itn strange that I should publish any thing about Colours, without a
particular Theory of them.

Read more of the 1664 book here, though apparently the best edition was published in 1852, with notes by John Holmes Esq, of the British Museum. Next time, some information from the Painter’s Companion, 1810, also sadly unquoted in my book, but deserving a mention.

Happy Thanksgiving to all those readers giving thanks.

Coming soon!

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Hello. Thanks for finding me! Actually I’m not sure that I’ve really found myself. As you’ve probably guessed, I’ve just picked up the keys for wordpress.com and I’m just learning how to drive it.

Once I’ve done that I’ll be back soon with a blog.. or something.