THE PUREST AND MOST THOUGHTFUL MINDS ARE THOSE WHICH LOVE COLOR THE MOST.
JOHN
RUSKIN,
THE
STONES
(1851-3)
OF
VENICE
The Secret Lives of Color JULIE ABIJANAC & TOM GATTIS CHRISTOPHER BURK JANE CARNEY JACCI DELANEY TERI DRYDEN MARK GINGERICH SCOTT GOSS CODY HEICHEL JEFFREY HIRST KRISTY HUGHES KATIE KIRK RICHARD LILLASH JOLENE POWELL
NAPLES YELLOW
AVOCADO
KOHL
OBSIDIAN
AMBER
LEAD WHITE
SAFFRON
MOUNTBATTEN PINK
IMPERIAL YELLOW
PUCE
ACID YELLOW
WOAD
ARCHIL
BAMAZI TALLE
VERDIGRIS
KENDRIC TONN
CERULEAN
Julie
Abijanac
&
Tom
Gattis
A CACHE OF PIGMENTS CALLED NAPLES YELLOW Macrame 10
x
9
$2000
x
yarn,
10,
11
x
Ash, 11
x
glue 7,
6
x
9
x
9.5
in.
each
NAPLES YELLOW "Although beloved for its color, and better behaved than chrome yellow, Naples yellow was far from being the most stable pigment. George Field approvingly mentioned its “considerable reputation,” opacity, and “pleasing, light, warm, yellow tint,” but was forced to admit that it had major drawbacks. Not only was it “liable to change even to blackness by damp and impure air” if incorrectly glazed; care also needed to be taken to ensure that no iron or steel implements came into contact with it. Field suggested using a spatula of ivory or horn instead."
From The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, p. 76-77
Christopher
Burk
AVOCADO HOUSE IN VOLCANIC ASH Oil
on
8
8
x
panel
in.
$1200
AVOCADO "These grand ideas and a burgeoning concern for the natural world were translated into a back-to-nature palette of early colors: burnt orange, harvest gold, and, above all, avocado. This shade, which appears so dated now, dominated palettes throughout the 1970s. As shoppers strove to appear sincerely concerned for the welfare of the world, the furthest reaches of consumer goods—clothing, kitchen appliances, baths, even care—were colonized by this smokey yellow-green tint."
From The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, p. 230-231
Jane
Carney
THE BIG, BOLD, AND BEAUTIFUL Mixed 66
x
media
50
on
canvas
in.
SOLD
KOHL “Bes is one of over 50 such kohl pots in the Louvre’s collection… Pots like these turn up in a lot of museum collections, because everyone in ancient Egypt, from pharaohs to peasants, male and female, rimmed their eyes with thick black lines; many were buried with jars of kohl so that they could continue to do so in the afterlife. Kohl was believed to have magical protective properties, and, as it does today, played the visual trick of making the whites of the eyes stand out, which was then, as now, considered distinctive and attractive."
From The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, p. 264-265
Jacci
Delaney
ZEN Cast 18
x
glass 19
x
1
in.
$2100
OBSIDIAN “There are many intriguing objects in the collection of the British Museum in London, but one of the most mysterious has to be a thick, dark, and highly polished disk with a small, hooped handle. The Aztecs forged the mirror from obsidian in honor of their god Tezcatlipoca (his name means “smoking mirror”), and it was brought over to the Old World after Cortés’s conquest of the region that is now Mexico, in the mid-sixteenth century. Obsidian, also known as volcanic glass, is formed when molten lava, erupting from the earth, comes into contact with ice or snow, and cools very quickly.”
From The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, p. 268-270
Teri
Dryden
SPLIT DECISION Mixed 40
x
media
40
on
panel
in.
$2900
AMBER “One of the few organic gemstones, true amber is extremely old. It is made of fossilized tree resin that once oozed from species of cedar and other conifers long since extinct. (Young amber, not yet fully fossilized, is known as copal.) For many, amber conjures up the scene from the film Jurassic Park, where a scientist extracts DNA from an insect that has been trapped and preserved in a sticky drop of resin. Insect occlusions in amber aren’t all that rare, probably because amber is a wonderful natural preservative.”
From The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, p. 101-103
Teri
Dryden
THE HIDDEN ROOM Mixed 30
x
media
30
on
panel
on
panel
in.
$2250
Teri
Dryden
ELEKTRON Mixed 30
x
media
40
$2500
in.
Mark
Gingerich
STILL LIFE WITH LEAD WHITE Oil 31.5
on x
canvas 27.5
in.
framed
$2900
LEAD WHITE “Lead white is a basic lead carbonate with a crystalline molecular structure. It is thick, opaque, and heavy, and there is strong evidence that it was being manufactured in Anatolia from around 2300 B.C. It has remained in production the world over ever since, using roughly the same method described by Pliny the Elder 2,000 years ago.”
From The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, p. 43-46
Mark
Gingerich
LEAD WHITE WINTER Oil 16
x
on 14
$1250
Mark
Gingerich
WINTER WHITE OUT Oil 19.5
on x
$1650
panel 16.5
in.
framed
canvas in.
panel
framed
Scott
Goss
ARCHITEXTURE_2101-01 Cast
glass
8
in.
x
6
individual
tile
|
12.5
x
20.5
as
assembled
above
$950
SAFFRON “Imagine a field in the predawn blue haze of an autumn morning. The field is small, and probably in Iran, although it could also be in Spain, Macedonia, Kashmir, France, or Morocco. As the sun rises it shows that the field, which had been bare earth the night before, is carpeted with small violet blooms: thousands of Crocus sativus. At the center of each, lasciviously prominent against the purple of the petals, are three crimson stigmas, part of the flower’s female sex organs, better known (once removed and dried) as the spice saffron. Before becoming saffron, however, the crocuses need to be harvested, and there isn’t much time: by the head of the day the blooms will have begun to wilt; by the evening they will have withered completely.”
From The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, p. 98-100
Cody
Heichel
DUSK IN DECEMBER, 270 OVERPASS Acrylic 36
x
48
on
canvas
in.
SOLD
MOUNTBATTEN PINK “For the first six decades of the twentieth century, at precisely 4 p.m. each Thursday, the horn of a large cruise liner would sound across Southampton Water and a UnionCastle ship would slip from its berth and steal south, bound for Cape Town. Even if the timing hadn’t been as regimented, it would still have been difficult to mistake these ships for any other: they had scarlet funnels trimmed at the top with a stripe of black; their upper decks were gleaming shite while their hulls were an indeterminate dull lavender-gray-pink shade. It was a feature their poster advertisements made much of: those proud pinkish hulls slicing through blue waves, with sunlit landscapes visible in the background.”
From The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, p. 120-121
Jeffrey
Hirst
IMPERIAL STRUCTURE Encaustic 37
x
33
and
oil
on
shaped
panel
in.
$4600
IMPERIAL YELLOW “In China, even regular yellow had been special for over a thousand years. Together with red, blue-green, black, and white, it was one of the five colors of the five-element theory. Each color corresponded with a season, direction, element, planet, and animal. Yellow was allied with the element of earth—an ancient Chinese saying is “The sky is blackish blue and the earth is yellow”—the center, Saturn, late or long summer, and the dragon.”
From The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, p. 84-85
Jeffrey
Hirst
CHANT Encaustic 42
x
37
$5500
and
in.
oil
on
shaped
panel
Kristy
Hughes
GOING GOING GONE Acrylic, 43.5
x
collage,
40.75
spray
paint,
airbrush
on
panel
in.
SOLD
PUCE “Her [Marie Antoinette] husband, King Louis XVI, sensing his wife’s sartorial indulgences were dangerously unseemly, was less than thrilled when he found her trying on a new lutestring (glossy silk taffeta) gown in a peculiar shade somewhere between brown, pink, and gray. Had he been feeling more chivalrous he might have called it “faded rose” but instead he observed that it resembled the couleur de puce—the color of fleas.”
From The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, p. 122-123
Katie
Kirk
ACID YELLOW TORSO WITH RED SPINE Acrylic 20
x
24
and in.
paint
skins
on
linen
framed
$975
ACID YELLOW “Soon the acid yellow of the smiley seeped out to become the signature color of the dance-happy youth, euphoric one moment, insidious, chemical, and rebellious the next. Rave culture—or rather the drugs that were believed to fuel it—began to cause moral panic. “Acid” could refer both to the subgenre of house music and to LSD, while this bright yellow also evoked the laser light shows of nightclubs.”
From The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, p. 74-75
Richard
Lillash
SPRING WINDOW WITH TULIPS Oil 32
on x
canvas
26
in.
framed
$2800
WOAD “Extracting indigo from woad plants is long, complicated, and expensive. Once harvested the leaves are ground to a paste, formed into balls, and left to cure. After 10 weeks, when the balls have lost three-quarters of their size and nine-tenths of their weight, water is added and the mixture is left to ferment again. After a further two weeks the woad will be very dark and granular, resembling tar.”
From The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, p. 198-200
Richard
Lillash
WINTER SUNSET, OLENTANGY RIVER Oil 16
x
on
panel
22
in.
framed
$1400
Richard
Lillash
SNOW COVERED JASTRAM GROVE Oil
on
8
18
x
$1200
panel in.
framed
Richard
Lillash
SKULL STUDY (WOAD) Oil 16
x
on 16
$1500
panel in.
framed
Jolene
Powell
ATMOSPHERIC ARCHIL Acrylic 24
x
18
on
panel
in.
$1400
ARCHIL “Color can be found in the most unpromising of places. Archil (alias: orchil, orchell, tournesol, orcein, and cudbear) is a dark red-purple dye, made from lichens. Most people know lichen when they see it growing flatly on bricks or the bark of trees, but few take much notice. On closer inspection, lichen proves more intriguing. It is not a single organism but usually two, typically a fungus and an alga, living in a symbiotic relationship so close that it takes a microscope to distinguish one from the other.”
From The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, p. 165-166
Bamazi
Talle
MY DWELL (4) Oil
on
35.5
x
linen 29.5
in.
framed
$4800
VERDIGRIS “Verdigris is a naturally occurring carbonate that forms on copper and its alloy bronze when they are exposed to oxygen, water, carbon dioxide, or sulfur. It is this green patina that forms on old copper pipes and roofs, and which gives the Statue of Liberty the blue-green color of the misty sea she often faces. It took the elements 30 years to turn Gustave Eiffel’s second most famous structure from rosy copper to full green, far too long a time for an artist to wait for his pigment.”
From The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, p. 214-216
Kendric
Tonn
COMPOSITION IN CERULEAN WITH PINK Oil 23
on x
canvas
29
in.
framed
$3500
CERULEAN “A true cerulean pigment—one of the cobalt family—was not available to artists until the 1860s, and then only as a watercolor. Made from a mixture of cobalt and tin oxides known as cobalt stannate, it did not make much headway until the 1870s, when it was finally released as an oil paint; in this medium it lost the slight chalkiness it had in watercolors and seduced a generation of painters.”
From The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, p. 204-205
THE SECRET LIVES OF COLOR Written By: Kassia St. Clair
The Secret Lives of Color tells the stories of 75 unusual colors, from amber to absinthe, puce to pitch black, and from shocking pink to acid yellow. Initially inspired by the fanciful descriptions found researching a dissertation on eighteenth-century masquerade costumes at Oxford, Kassia’s fascination with pigments, dyes and hues, both beloved and obscure, blossomed into an obsession with the history of color. Across fashion and politics, art and war, The Secret Lives of Color tells a vivid story of our culture.
642 N High St.
614.233.1655
Columbus, OH 43215
info@brandtrobertsgalleries.com
The Secret Lives of Color is on view starting Friday, April 30th. Please join us for an artists' open house on Saturday, May 1. The exhibition will be on view through May 30th during gallery hours, Friday through Sunday, 1-5pm. Private appointments can be scheduled by emailing info@brandtrobertsgalleries.com or calling 614.223.1655. A virtual exhibition will be available at http://brandtrobertsgalleries.com/exhibitions.
www.brandtrobertsgalleries.com