“Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say, “In this world, Elwood, you must be” – she always called me Elwood – “In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.” Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.”
– Jimmy Stewart (Harvey, 1950)
The system of arranging colours in a circular spectrum demonstrates the principle of mixing two colours to obtain a third. Make orange by mixing yellow and magenta, green by mixing yellow and blue, and purple by mixing blue and magenta and on we go.
Hue is the attribute that distinguishes one colour from another. Tone is the position a hue holds on the scale from light to dark. Tints and shades are variations of tone. Intensity refers to how pure a colour is.
Primary colours are those which can be mixed to make all other colours. Primary colours can be Prismatic or Pigmented. Prismatic colours are produced by light and come in four hues: red, blue, green and yellow. Mix them together (by projection) and you get white. Pigmented primary colours are used in painting and have three hues: red, blue and yellow. Mix them together and you get black. Printers use cyan, magenta, yellow and black or CMYK.
Sit two colours side by side so they touch and they can create a third optical hue in our minds. Seurat put yellow dots next to blue dots so they appeared green from a distance. It was the discovery of perceptual colour mixing by Willhelm von Bezold that led to the CMYK printing process.
As an experiment in deducing the validity of common superstitions, tie a piece of toast, buttered side up, to the back of a cat. Throw the enhanced moggie out of a window. Will the cat land on its feet or will the toast land butter side down?
Note: No cat’s were hurt in the making of this experiment. The same cannot be said for the toast.
It was Baudelaire who opined that sculpture is “the stuff you bump into when you step backwards to admire a painting.” When the British Museum first deigned to open its doors to the general public somebody bumped into a Greek amphora, knocked it off its pedestal and smashed it to pieces. It was the one from Keat’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” -that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Ah well, he wasn’t to know. At least they did stick it back together again.
A writer was mortified to discover that he’d written a sentence which had also been written by George Bernard Shaw. Until, one day, he saw the same sentence in a book by Jonathan Swift.
In case I get accused of the same, I found this quote in a book by Alan Fletcher!
“The man who can’t visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.”
~ Andre Breton
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