Understanding Colour
Accustomed, as we are today, to having literally hundreds of paint colours available at the touch of the button on an automatic mixing machine, as well as the choice of thousands of textiles, printed and woven in bright design, it is instructive to think of the lengths - the sheer inventiveness and resourcefulness - to which people have gone in order to bring colour into their lives.
All paint colours and dyes as we know them today are, derived from mixing pigment with a binding medium, which allows them to be transferred onto a surface. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, when rapid chemical advance were made and pigments began to produced synthetically, colours were naturally obtained from the minerals and earth, vegetables and plants that were available. Early mediums included egg for the making of tempera, and later oil. There are about eight earth pigment, including sienna, ochre and umber, and these could be mixed with minerals like iron oxide and copper-based pigments to give a range of colours that suited every need. Roots like indigo were used, too. Rare, precious - and correspondingly expensive
- colours ware also made: rich ultramarine blue from crushed, ground lapis lazuli, and the brightest green from malachite treated in the same way. The tones and hues of colours differed, of course, from region to region, which is why we associate today certain colours - particularly those made from earth and clay - with certain areas.
Yarn, too, was rarely left in its natural, undyed state. From flowers and fruits to roots and bark - and even shellfish - dyes were squeezed from the natural world to brings colours to the neutral tones of wool, linen and cotton. In fact, textile rather than flat planes of colours seen on wall, are often the starting point for colours inspirations. Historically, fashion has inspired choices of decorative colours and it still does. To got to a museum of costume or an archive exhibition can be positively regenerating - the colour of embroidered threads on a eighteenth-century brocade waistcoat. The woven design on a nineteenth-century 'kirking' shawl. Modern fashion can be equally thought-provoking - booth street and couture fashion are constantly looking for new ways to use colour, many of which can be translated into decorative terms. This is also true of accessories : many couture houses, for example, once designed silk headscarves (an essential for the elegant woman). Painted design were hand-screened onto silk squares, and the.....
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