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 though and subtlety of colour that went into these
period pieces are text book examples of the use of colour....

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