by Carmen Wolf, MGMoA Trustee
Color! We are surrounded by vibrant colors, neutral colors, soft colors, and loud colors. From the blue of the sky, the orange of a sunset, the color of the earth, to vibrant colors in flowers, colors are everywhere. How many times do we rush past not paying attention? Have you thought about what it takes to recreate these colors to paint with? We are spoiled now that technology has reached a point where we can bring just about anything into a paint store, and they can come very close to recreating it. We can walk into an art store and select from hundreds of colors to find just the right one. That wasn’t always the case.
Recreating colors to use for art has been going on for thousands of years. The oldest paintings that have been found were painted 45,000 years ago in Leang Tedongnge cave on a remote Indonesian island called Sulawesi. The paintings were created using red ochre pigments mixed with saliva. Red ochre has been found in several prehistoric paintings leading experts to believe it was the first color used to create art. Other prehistoric paints that have been found were made from minerals, charcoal, and soil. People used materials that were available to them which left artists with a limited palette of black, white, red, yellow, and brown.
Once people started traveling and trading, a new world of color was discovered. People became very ingenious and discovered how to make colors by combining ingredients together. Rare ingredients from all over Europe and the Middle East were combined with plentiful (and gross) things like urine and manure. The new colors included Egyptian blue made from sand, lime and copper; a red made from mercury and sulfur; and white made by enclosing pieces of lead in pots with manure and vinegar. Oh, think of the smell!
One problem that came up repeatedly throughout the years was the toxicity of the paints. We now know how dangerous mercury, arsenic and lead are, but at the time people didn’t connect the symptoms they were experiencing and deaths to those materials. Lead was used to make white paint; mercury was used to make red; and arsenic was used to make yellow and green.
Many of the colors were easy and inexpensive to make, but others cost as much as gold. A vibrant blue had been impossible to create until the Middle Ages when a technique to make blue paint from lapis lazuli was discovered. Lapis Lazuli is a beautiful semi-precious stone that is mined in the Sar-i Sang mountains of Afghanistan. The stone has been used to make jewelry for thousands of years and had proven difficult to turn into pigment. In the 14th and 15th centuries a process was discovered to make a pigment called ultramarine. The process was very intensive, and the paint was as expensive as gold. Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring is a well-known example of the use of ultramarine.
Have you ever wondered why purple is associated with royalty? One color that was equally as difficult to create as blue was purple. In the 2nd century BCE the Phoenicians first discovered a small shellfish that secreted a yellow liquid when crushed. Once the secretion came in contact with air it turned purple. The purple liquid made a beautiful purple color, called Tyrian purple when used to dye fabric. The problem was that it took a huge number of shellfish, 12,000 to 15,000, to make enough dye for one piece of clothing. Because of the beauty of the color and the cost, only the very wealthy could afford to use it. In fact, in Rome, Caesar prohibited anyone but himself from wearing anything purple. Eventually, other high-ranking people were allowed to wear purple, but the cost was prohibitive for most.
There are many more intriguing stories behind different paint colors and there is a lot of information available online. My challenge for you is to walk through the Mabee-Gerrer galleries and look at the colors in the paintings. Are they murky, soft, dark, light, muted, vibrant, etc. Then look at the date the painting was created. Does this give you any insight as to why certain colors were or weren’t included?
