10 November 04

Rivers

qb of Frizzy Logic went to meet Natalie of Blaugustine and bought a picture this week. There are tantalizing glimpses of them, not quite straight-on. I was mesmerized by their accounts and images of this encounter, and by Natalie’s art.

The next day I got a note from another artist friend in the UK, Brian Pike. We knew each other back when he was a graduate student in philosophy at Cambridge and I wasn’t. His topic was enthralling, though: human color perception. I argued that different cultures had a different sense of color. He didn’t think so: he said if I asked a Yanomami indian to point out their reddest red, it probably would be pretty close to mine. oh, I said. (I said this a lot when I lived in Cambridge.)

His route to becoming an artist was complicated, but I for one am so glad he did.

House in a ChasmFrom the hauntingly spare images of lonely houses on Yorkshire moors to monkeys in Tamil Nadu, whose texture is only whispered across the continents at 72 dpi, I want to go buy a picture, too. I want to show up on his doorstep and have a cup of tea and plunge my face into these images that remind me of something I can’t quite remember. He says Paul Klee is the most important artist of the 20th century. Not Kandinsky, I’d say? There would be chocolate biscuits.

(I guess I’m pining for Yorkshire. People who know what Yorkshire’s like in November will probably think I’m nuts, though Coup de Vent seems not to mind.)

Brian’s art has kept us in touch, I think. And I wonder how many other friends I had who could have done something this but chose other, perhaps easier, ways, with whom I have now lost all contact. Like with Natalie and qb, the images jump, shortcircuting language. I love words. But I love breathing through my eyes, too, having this other river that flows through my soul.

Posted by at 03:50 PM in Design Arts | Link |
  1. Thanks for this lovely post, Pica, and for the link to Brian’s site which I’ve just visited – I love his pictures. The Klee touch is certainly there but he’s wholly individual.

    — Natalie    11. November 2004, 04:47    Link
  2. I’m not so sure about your friend’s point of view about how different cultures percieve colors differently. I know that here in Japan very often I will point to something that, to me, looks green, and the Japanese will say it is blue. Even the go traffic lights are called “blue”. Forests are called “blue”, when talking about the abundance of life seen in a view of the forest, but “green” when emphasizing the vitality of the trees themselves. Japanese in general are also able to name far more subtleties in hue and tone than most westerners; often they argue quite vehemently with me about the naming of shades of red for instance, differentiating small increments that often I can’t even find vocabulary for (and I consider myself quite versed in color).

    I don’t know how it is in other cultures, but there must be environmental influences that have affected cultures, too. I don’t see how a people who lived for millenia in a monotone landscape like Scandinavia or Alaska can possibly perceive colors the same way as a people who lived for millenia in a color-rich landscape like the Southwest, the African savannah, or the Amazon. If people’s bodies can evolved to physically look so different according to their original environments, I don’t see why color perception can’t be different, too… if just for survival. how anyone ever done a study of this? (my father wrote a book on color perception when I was a boy and that heavily influenced me).

    — butuki    11. November 2004, 06:27    Link
  3. I enjoyed Brian’s pics. Very playful. Don’t for a minute agree about the universality of colour perception. And where does perception end and naming begin. Identifying colours is surely not to do with what “really exists” out there but more to do with the narratives people live in about colour. I suspect it’s all in the language. There are people who are sold the simplified colour equations of red + blue = purple, those who experiement with mixing and applying techniques with oils and acrylics and those who mix CMYK or RGB. The latter has influenced me a lot. So I often say things like it’s too blue when looking at a red or a green and realise that others don’t know what I’m referring to. So there may be different descriptions of colour within cultures based on their stories about the contexts in which those colours arise. “Perception” would then be a social phenomenon. And finally how did America lose the ‘u’ in colour? It makes ‘color’ such a colourless word.

    A propos Yorkshire in November, it’s divine. Do visit!

    — Coup de Vent    13. November 2004, 11:02    Link

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