Bright earth
by Philip Ball · first published 2001
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2019–2024first – last mentioned
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"Bright Earth provides a glimpse into a little-explored avenue in the history of art and science: the creation of pigments and dyes and their influence on painting, as well as on fashion, merchandising, and the textile and chemical industries. For as long as artists have turned their dreams into images, they have relied on technical knowledge to supply their materials. Today almost every shade imaginable is easily available in off-the-shelf tubes; every hue and tincture is manufactured and ready for immediate use by the painter. But up until the eighteenth century, most artists ground and mixe
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Try "Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Colour" by Phillip Ball. [0]. If you're just interested in the colour blue there's also "Blue: The History of a Color" by Michel Pastoureau [1]. The Pastoureau book is more of…
on “Lapis Lazuli: A Blue More Precious Than Gold” ↗…digital images, Philip Ball tells the fascinating story of how art, chemistry, and technology have interacted throughout the ages to render the gorgeous hues we admire on our walls and in our museums." Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color Paperback – Illustrated, April 15, 2003 https://www.amazon.com/Bright-Earth-Art-Invention-Color/dp/0... https://www.philipball.co.uk/
on “The first blue pigment discovered in 200 years is now commercially available” ↗Also "Bright Earth : Invention of Colour" by Philip Ball.
on “Color or Fruit? On the Unlikely Etymology of “Orange” (2018)” ↗…you can demonstrate the fact for yourself just by looking at these flowers. Incidentally, the quoted text in the last sentence is the title of a book review in Scientific American by Peter G. Brown of Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color by Philip Ball (SciAm ISSN 0036-8733, Vol. 286, Nº 3, 2002, pp 98-100). There's more about the book below. Finally, this brings me to the point about YInMn blue. I recall…
on “YInMn, the First New Blue Pigment in Two Centuries” ↗…twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including 'H2O: A Biography of Water', 'Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour', 'The Music Instinct', and 'Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything'. Philip's book 'Critical Mass' won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. He is also a…
on “What is life and how does it work? – with Philip Ball [video]” ↗