Tag: colour

my relationship with pink isn’t a friendly one

Behind the scenes of the As Real As It Gets… “sweded” photoshop advertising poster for software-asli.com.

The raspberry red we bought from Home Depot dried a violent pink on the wall, the pink of a small girl’s pink velvet stirrup pants in the 80’s, even after seven coats. I swore upon seeing it the next morning, having forgotten overnight how appallingly bright it turned out. Gah. My eyes. Anyone’s eyes! Amazing what a bit of colour will do. Oi. Change the whole place, it does. Yes. Into a bad television set for brain damaged teenagers, all ironic and post-hateful and too cheerful for words.

I’m very glad we discovered this before we painted more than one space with it, though not so glad that we didn’t start with the spare room wall and not the kitchen. Small mercies duking it out with slightly bigger regrets. Who will win? News at eleven.

To rectify this horrible mistake, David and I spent part of our Remembrance Day with our heads bowed in the heavy crush of DIY sawdust yuppies at Home Depot. We had the paint retinted darker and bought a tiny tin of sinfully delicious red that we’re going to pour in before painting the next, more hopeful, coat. A final gasp for our currently blinding kitchen. Apparently Nicole is going to be over again today while I’m at work, hanging out with David who’s sick today, and painting. If that doesn’t work, I’m going to spraypaint it matte black, out of adorable girlish spite.

Lung and I took pictures today

“LANGUAGES divide the spectrum up in different ways. Welsh speakers use “gwyrdd” (pronounced “goo-irrrth”) as a general word for green. Yet “grass” literally translates as “blue straw”. That is because the Welsh word for blue (“glas”) can accommodate all shades of green. English-speaking anthropologists affectionately squish “green” and “blue” together to call Welsh an example of a “grue” language. A few of them think grue languages are spoken by societies that live up mountains or near the equator because ultraviolet radiation, which is stronger in such places, causes a progressive yellowing of the lens. This, the theory goes, makes the eye less sensitive to short wavelengths (those that correspond to the green and blue parts of the spectrum). Unfortunately, though the Welsh do live in a hilly country, it is hardly mountainous enough—let alone sunny enough—to qualify.

The ultraviolet theory, however, is just one idea among many in the debate about the psychology of colour. Like many debates in psychology, this one pits congenital, fundamentally genetic, explanations against explanations that rely on environmental determinism. Psychologists in the former camp think people are born with ingrained ideas about how hues are grouped. They believe the brain is preconditioned to pick out the six colours on a Rubik’s cube whatever tongue it is taught to think in. The other camp, by contrast, thinks that the spectrum can be chopped into categories anywhere along its length. Moreover, they suspect that the language an individual learns from his parents is the main explanation for where that chopping takes place.

… There is a fundamental—presumably congenital—distinction, as shown by the fact that the non-linguistic side of the brain distinguishes between blue and green. But there is also a language-mediated one, as shown by the linguistic side’s greater response.”

article link from the clever lucaskrech, lighting engineer extraordinaire

reality shift, wow

from quantz:

A Group of Workers Harvesting Tea, ca. 1907-1915.

“This exhibit, The Empire That Was Russia, has been a favourite of mine for a while now. I come back and look at it once in a while.

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was a photographer in Russia at the turn of the last century. He developed a technique wherein he took three pictures of a scene – each with a red, green, and blue filter – and used projectors to display what were, in effect, colour photographs, before the technology of colour film had actually been developed. In his day, they didn’t look so hot because it was hard to get the projectors lined up. But today, we (ie: the Library of Congress) has scanned them and combined them digitally, and the results are AMAZING. You should all look at those pictures: it’s like seeing an alternate universe or something. I can’t recommend them enough.”

This picture, Peasant Girls, was taken in 1909.

and this, View of the Monastery from the Solarium, 1910.

I am rather in awe at how modern these look while at the same time, so antique. The clothes are a give away, as are the manner of industry. I think these are precious. I seriously endorse giving this page a thorough look.

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