I've heard about the golden mean and fair curves and I can turn a bowl
with a reasonable approach to them. I can proceed thru twenty six grits
of sand-
paper, then buff from tripoli to carnauba by way of white diamond. I've
got wax and oil, lacquer and varnish, detergent and shoe polish. I can
draw overlapping leaves on my turnings and dremel them to a
fare-the-well. Then why are Andi's bowls basking in the Del Mano while
it's iffy if mine will grace the booth between the 4-H pigs and the
Future Farmer's goats at the Martin County Fair? It appears that the
only thing holding me back from greatness must be color, so I surfed the
net to learn all about Andi's colors of Fall, as well as the rest of the
year. I'm still barred from the Del Mano, but like any lout with a tiny
bit of shallow knowledge, I am compelled to force it on a long suffering
rcw.
So if all artists, photographers, physicists and anyone else who knows
anything at all about color will please leave, I'll try to write a
little primer & expose' for the rest of us. Like it or not, colored
turnings are here, so we better get with the program.
***********************************************
Color has to do with the wavelength and frequency of light. The colors
of a bowl will be perceived according to which
wave lengths the bowl absorbs; ie. you don't see the colors of the
absorbed waves.The visible wavelengths (colors) make up a spectrum
ranging from red to violet (Roy G. Biv) and can be thought of as a clock
face with red at 12, yellow at 4, and blue at 8. These are the pure or
primary colors, and all the rest are mixtures of them. The so-called
secondary colors are mixes of primaries. They are orange (red & yellow)
at 2, green (yellow & blue) at 6, and violet (blue & red) at 10. The
tertiary colors are mixes of a primary and a secondary color and are
named for the mix: red-orange at 1, yellow-orange at 3, yellow-green at
5, green-blue at 7, blue violet at 9 and red-violet at 11. Then there's
white, made up of all colors and black with none. That's all you need to
know about colors, so you should soon be in the Del Mano. But wait!
there's more. If you order today, you also get shades (a color + black),
tints (a color + white) and intensity (dull or bright). A bright color
contains relatively little gray, while dull colors contain relatively
more gray, compared to its pure component. We will also include hues and
tones if you order now. A hue is the resultant color that you see,
whether pure or a mix. Only women know the names for tones; names such
as watermelon, lemonade, etc. Tone depends upon what is mixed with a
pure color. A pure color (R,Y,G) has no tone. Everything else has some
tone depending on what's mixed up with the pure. (Sociologists and
Anthropologists should have left also.) Anyway, this important
knowledge about color that I am braying 'ex cathedra' should certainly
make you a great wood artist. _Except that I forgot to mention that
the colors those miserable critics appreciate vary with the spaces and
colors surrounding our masterpieces. Also different kinds of sunlight,
light bulbs and retinas of the beholders change viewer's perceptions .
We can't win, so let's hear it for pure unadulterated wood grain and
pretend not to care about color. That is, if anybody's still awake.
Arch

Fortiter,