thecolourtheorycookbook

[thecolourtheorycookbook]

[thecolourtheorycookbook]

Just talked with a Steiner teacher about wet-on-wet watercolour painting. Links with formlessness in colour, child's immersion, paradisal view in Benjamin. Going to try learn the technique.

[thecolourtheorycookbook]

Anne Boyer in GARMENTS AGAINST WOMEN (2015) has a fragment on the colour blue. 

He is the man who looks at the blue sky and says, “Do not remember this sky as blue.”

To look up later

[thecolourtheorycookbook]

^ to read

[thecolourtheorycookbook]

oxford st

[thecolourtheorycookbook]

“Goethe's colour theory cards”

[thecolourtheorycookbook]

On Saturday I went to the old Feira da Ladra flea market in Lisbon and come across a box of old chandelier pendents. I bought two for three euros and in the evening hung them from the main light in my room. Occasionally they show a prism of light.

[thecolourtheorycookbook]

On the 19th of May, I collected Maria Schildler’s book on Goethe’s colour theory from my sister’s house, as I had it posted there. Unlike the copies I had looked through before, this one was damaged - half of the pages translucent from what seems like oil.

Flicking through the book again I noticed a particular footnote for the first time. When Schilder first mentions prisms in relation to an experiment, she advises the reader to go to the Rudolf Steiner House on 35 Park Road to buy one. Given I was in London, I decided to go. The man in the bookshop told me that he didn’t really know anything about her (but the publisher NEW KNOWLEDGE BOOKS is somehow connected to Steiner) and also that they no longer sell prisms. Given Maria Schindler shares part of her name with Alma Maria Mahler Gropius Werfel (born Alma Margaretha Maria Schindler), it is tricky to locate details of her online. Looking through the books in Steiner House did make me realise though that Schindler’s graphic style, exhibited in plates at the back of the book, is very close to the style taught and learnt in Steiner School: a mystical type of expressionism that feels more didactic than artistic.

[thecolourtheorycookbook]

important

[thecolourtheorycookbook]

“In 1798/9, Goethe and Schiller created this colour wheel concerning the ‘allegoric, symbolic, mystic usage of colour’. In his notes, he assigns human characteristics to each colour. He denotes positivity with the warm colours on the right side, and on the left, with negativity. Newton decided only spectral colors could count as fundamental. But Goethe approach allowed him to recognize the essential role of ‘(nonspectral) magenta in a complete color circle, a role that it still has in all modern colour systems. From the twelve colours, he grouped them into 4 temperaments: sanguine, melancholic, choleric and phlegmatic”. (I would like to think, at some point, of the role of numerology in colour theory)

↓

“Using Goethe's color theory, I created an app that helps one choose a film based on the color that matched their current mood”

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[thecolourtheorycookbook]

“During a party in Weimar in the winter of 1785, Goethe had a late-night conversation with the South American revolutionary Francisco de Miranda. In a letter written to Count Semyon Romanovich Vorontsov (1792), Miranda recounted how Goethe, fascinated with his exploits throughout the Americas and Europe, told him, "Your destiny is to create in your land a place where primary colours are not distorted.” He proceeded to clarify what he meant:

“ First he explained to me the way the iris transforms the light into the three primary colours... then he said, "Why yellow is the most warm, noble and closest to the bright light; why Blue is that mix of excitement and serenity, so far that it evokes the shadows; and why Red is the exaltation of Yellow and Blue, the synthesis, the vanishing of the bright light into the shadows".

[thecolourtheorycookbook]

“The flag of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast consists of a rainbow on a white background, with seven narrow horizontal colored stripes: red, orange, yellow, green, sky blue, blue and purple. The number of colors is meant to symbolize the seven-branched Jewish Menorah. The flag's aspect ratio is 2:3. The seven colored stripes are centered vertically and regularly spaced; they have a height each equal to  1⁄40 of the total flag's height, and are separated by a thin spacing equal to  1⁄120 of the total flag's height.

The white color of the cloth represents purity. Rainbows are the biblical symbol of peace, happiness, goodness. The number of bands of the rainbow equal to the number of candles in the Menorah, one of the national religious Jewish symbols. The Menorah speaks of the creation of the world in seven days, and the number of bands of the rainbow emphasizes the connection with the ancient Jewish symbol. Also, the rainbow may symbolize the Seven Noahide laws” (Wikipedia)

[thecolourtheorycookbook]

"Charles Fourier (1772–1837) designed a plot of land and named it the phalanstery. It would comprise 1620 people, a male and a female exemplar of the 810 character-types that Fourier believed exhausted all character-types. The buildings would be set next to a stream of water intersected by hills to aid cultivation. Fourier calculated that its library would amass 800,000 books with a natural encyclopaedia at its centre. The phalanstery’s flag comprised seven colours, arranged as a rainbow to reflect each of the seven passions [...].”

Plus indigo or violet 

...