November 24, 2020 Hue's Hue Verdigris: The Color of Oxidation, Statues, and Impermanence By Katy Kelleher Palais Paar, Vienna, Austria, ca. 1765–72 (Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art) It’s hard to imagine now, but people once gathered together freely, shoulders rubbing against shoulders, breath exchanged between lungs, bodies open to one another—all this closeness, almost a million people standing in a crowd just to watch a statue get undressed. It was a rainy October day in 1886 and the Statue of Liberty was shrouded in a French flag. The weather was miserable and the ceremonial unveiling went poorly. The drapery was pulled off too soon (right in the middle of a speech), and the fireworks display had to be canceled and rescheduled. Still, over a million freezing New Yorkers came out (including a boat full of suffragettes, protesting the statue). While it’s hard for me to even imagine standing inside a crowd of that size, it’s harder still to imagine the Statue of Liberty herself, as she looked then. Before she was the verdigris icon, patron saint of many a bespoke paint color, she was copper-skinned. Brown, not green. It felt like a revelation to read that tiny detail in Ian Frazier’s New Yorker piece on Statue of Liberty green. When residents first beheld Lady Liberty, they saw not an otherworldly, aqua-skinned allegory holding her lit torch to the sky, but a metallic, regal woman stretching upward from a granite plinth. It’s a simple enough fact, and yet I have trouble wrapping my head around it. Brown, not green. Read More
October 20, 2020 Hue's Hue Russet, the Color of Peasants, Fox Fur, and Penance By Katy Kelleher Amedeo Modigliani, Reclining Nude, 1917 Mary Stuart was six days old when she became the Queen of Scotland. Her precious body was guarded from that moment onward, moved like a pawn on a chessboard from one castle to another. Maybe the people would have loved her if she hadn’t been spirited away to be raised in France in 1548, but perhaps they wouldn’t have. Maybe Mary was doomed to always be loathed for her femaleness and her Catholicism. By the time she returned to the newly Protestant Scotland at age eighteen, she had spent over a decade in the French court, developing a taste for elaborate gowns and flashy jewels. She was tall and graceful, beautiful according to some accounts, but this didn’t endear her to the common people. While Mary was strutting around in fine lace and velvet and elaborate lockets, her people were told that God wanted them in chaste, sober clothes. Embroidery was deemed “unseemly” as were “light and variant hues in clothing, as red, blue, yellow and such like, which declare the lightness of mind.” Instead, the Scots were told to wear simple fabrics in “grave colour,” such as “black, russet, sad grey, or sad brown.” Portrait of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, c. 1500s This depressing list comes from a summary of the 1575 General Assembly of the Kirk, recorded in the Domestic Annals of Scotland. Although the upper classes continued to wear silks and velvets and pretty bright dresses, most people wore their sad rags. It was more practical, to be dressed in dark gray and black and brown. Life for the lower classes was hard. The clothing reflected this fact. And yet, thrown in with those drab colors was russet. In this context, russet was both a general chromatic descriptor and a specific type of rough spun cloth, colored with a mixture of woad (a member of the cabbage family that was used to make a blue-gray dye) and madder (a similarly yellow-flowered herb whose roots could be turned into a pinkish-brown dye). Russet wasn’t a bright color, but it was at least more cheerful than “sad grey,” it had a bit more life than black. While Mary, Queen of Scots reportedly wore vivid scarlet under her black mourning clothes, her people dressed like dead leaves and gray stones. At their most vibrant, they could wear the color of rust, of dirty root vegetables, of aging fox fur. Peter Breugel the Elder, The Return of the Herd (November), 1565 It may sound like I dislike russet, but I don’t. Over the last decade, I have learned to appreciate the textures and rhythms of the later months of the year. Russet is the color of November in Maine. The color that emerges when all the more spectacular leaves have fallen: the yellow coins of the white birch, the big, hand-shaped crimson leaves of the red maple, the papery pumpkin-hued spears of the beech trees. The oaks are always the last to shed their plumage, and their leaves are the dullest color. They’re the darkest, the closest to brown. But if you pay attention, you’ll see that they’re actually quite pretty. Russet is a subtle color, complicated by undertones of orange and purple. Indeed, according to some color wheel systems, “russet” is the name given to the tertiary color created by mixing those two secondary colors. Its only companions in this category are slate (made from purple and green) and citron (made from green and yellow). Like russet, citron and slate occur often in the natural world. Our Earth is a blue marble if you get far enough away, but from up close, it’s so very brown, so often gray. Unknown artist, botanical illustration c. 1905 (© wikimedia commons) This may explain why many cultures think of russet and similar dull reds as neutral hues, akin to the monochrome scale of white, black, and the innumerable shades between. True reds, the crimsons and vermilions and scarlets, have historically been associated with fire, blood, and power. In Red: The History of a Color, Michel Pastoureau explains that, for thousands of years, red was “the only true color.” He continues, “as much on the chronological as hierarchical level, it outstripped all others.” In ancient Greece, high priests and priestesses dressed in crimson, as did (they imagined) the gods themselves. In contrast, the dull reds, the brown reds, have been understood as “emblematic of peasantry and impoverishment,” claims Victoria Finlay in An Atlas of Rare & Familiar Colour. Finlay files red ocher among the browns—the ruddy pigment used in the caves of Lascaux—which is perhaps where it belongs. Perhaps that’s where russet belongs, too. But it’s not entirely clear. Paging through both books, I see reds and browns together more often than not. They’re close, those hues. A generous eye can see the fiery warmth blazing beneath the brown, the homely walnut emerging from the red. Winslow Homer, The Fox Hunt, 1893 It seems likely that russet, as a word, is an offshoot of red (Old French rousset from Latin russus, “reddish”). But russet means more than red-like, red-adjacent. It also means rustic, homely, rough. It also evokes mottled, textured, coarse. The word describes a quality of being that can affect people as well as vegetables. Apples can be russet, when they have brown patches on their skin. Potatoes famously are russet; their skin often has that strange texture that makes it impossible to tell where the earth ends and the root begins. There are russet birds and russet horses—it’s an earthy word that fits comfortably on many creatures. For Shakespeare, it was a color of poverty and prudence, mourning and morning. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Biron imagines a life without the finer things, without silks and taffeta, a life of sacrifice undertaken to prove his love. The color of his penance? Russet. and I here protest, By this white glove;—how white the hand, God knows!— Henceforth my wooing mind shall be express’d In russet yeas and honest kersey noes: And, to begin, wench,—so God help me, la!— My love to thee is sound, sans crack or flaw. Just a few decades after this was written, in a country not too far away, Peter Paul Rubens was painting with brilliant crimson and shocking vermilion. Rubens was a devout Roman Catholic, a religion that embraced sumptuous fabrics and rich colors. A generation later, another northern painter would rise to prominence: Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. While Catholic Rubens loved shocking reds, rich blues, and even sunny yellows, Protestant Rembrandt painted with a far more restrained palette. Many of his most famous paintings (including his self portraits) are predominantly brown and gray. And when he did use color, Rembrandt very often reached for russet, auburn, fulvous, and tawny. Reds that leaned brown, and browns that leaned red. Sometimes, he brought in a splash of crimson to tell the viewer where they should focus (the vibrant sash in Night Watch, the cloaks in Prodigal Son), and sometimes he let soft, misty yellow light bathe his bucolic landscapes. His work was earthy, imbued with the quiet chill of early November. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, The Return of the Prodigal Son, c.1668 I’ve been thinking on russet lately, this color of oak and Rembrandt and austerity. Its terra-cotta earthiness fits my mood. I’m hunkering down for winter, making paprika-spiked stews and big pots of beans with bacon, always dutifully freezing a portion for later. I’ve been readying myself not for hibernation, but for months of social isolation. According to both the Farmer’s Almanac and common sense, it’s going to be a hard winter for North America. As though inspired by the celebrity fat bears of Katmai, I’ve noticed myself bundling up, bulking up, and reaching for thick, warm clothes in rusty earth tones. My mother always favored a restrained palette; she recently gave me a big bag of sweaters she no longer wants, and three of them are russet. One, a cable-knit wool turtleneck, is from the nineties, but it could be from the seventies. It could be from Autumn/Winter 2020 (“brown is the new black,” proclaims Vogue Paris). It could be from any decade, really. It has timeless mom energy, something I find myself needing to channel more and more often lately. “Tab details on suit ensemble,” New York Public Library Digital Collections. I’m not alone. There’s a certain type of influencer on the rise, one that has embraced my mother’s color palette of auburn, terra-cotta, russet, and beige. These seventies-styled babes fill my feed with macramé plant hangers, comfortable linen pants, and seemingly bewitched, bottomless closets filled with eco-friendly, transparently produced leaf-colored clothing. Call them cottage-core or cozy-core or whatever you like—I call them inspiring. These are women who have become very good at figuring out what light makes their small spaces look roomy, what angles make their baggy outfits look chic. They are people who have managed to style their thrift shop ceramics with tasteful stacks of books, chosen for the color of their spines and the way they sit on the shelves. They are people who can make the most of what they have, turn pixels into money, brown into russet. Fashion by Louise Chéruit – automobile coat, illustration by Pierre Brissaud, published in La Gazette du Bon-Ton, 1913 I’ve been styling my shelves recently, putting this interesting seashell next to that matryoshka doll, picking out books that tell a story of myself that I want seen. Right now, I can’t go into public and present myself. I have to stay at home, stay safe, and save money. I feel a bit as though I’m arranging shelves while America burns around me, but I’m not sure what else I can do. Collectively, it feels as if we are grasping at straws. I read a New York Times series from fashion designers on how to turn pillowcases into skirts and dishrags into handbags. Stripped of our museums and our boutiques and our money, we are now forced to occupy ourselves in new ways. It harkens back to the grain-sack fashions of the Great Depression, dyed with marigold and cabbage, that the United States government pushed on broke housewives. Here’s an idea, they said, why don’t you try and make the most of it? Wladyslaw Strzeminski, Kompozycja architektoniczna, 1929 I hear a similar command echoing through our current events now. The top echelons of power are asking the lowest to support them wholeheartedly, to play the part of the willing serf, the peasant in russet while they go about in gaudy red ties that gleam polyester-bright on white dress shirts. We’re living in a time of great economic inequality and instability. In the news, there are reports of white nationalist groups advocating for a Civil War, radio pundits talking about “blood on the streets,” and a rapidly growing cult that slavishly begs their messiah to give them a sign, any sign, so they can begin their purge. I disagree vehemently with all of these groups, yet they’ve succeeded in creating a sense of foreboding in me that I can’t shake, no matter what I do. I see the same thunderheads gathering. I share the dread. I can ward it off, for brief moments, by focusing on beauty. The fear is still there, under the awe, under the gratitude, but for now, I walk around outside with my head tilted up, to better see the leaves and the blue sky behind. For now, I notice the shades of brown that have been there long before us and will be there still. Read more of Katy Kelleher’s color stories here. Katy Kelleher is a writer who lives in the woods of rural New England with her two dogs and one husband. She is the author of Handcrafted Maine.
August 19, 2020 Hue's Hue Periwinkle, the Color of Poison, Modernism, and Dusk By Katy Kelleher Claude Monet, Water Lilies On a stretch of rural road not far from my house, there is a small wood where, once a year, for just a few short and cold days, the ground turns a magnificent shade of purple. In a reversal of fortunes, the stand of gracious Maine trees becomes secondary to the ground cover below. When the periwinkles are blooming, it’s hard to have eyes for anything else. The delicate mist is an impossibly soft color, like clouds descending into twilight, like the snowfall in an Impressionist masterpiece. It’s a color that almost doesn’t belong here—it’s a plant that certainly doesn’t. Periwinkle goes by many names. You might know her by one of her more fabulous monikers, like sorcerer’s violet or fairy’s paintbrush. In Italy, she is called fiore di morte (flower of death), because it was common to lay wreaths of the evergreen on the graves of dead children. The flower is sometimes associated with marriage (and may have been the “something blue” in the traditional wedding rhyme), sometimes associated with sex work (because of its supposed aphrodisiac properties) and also with executions. I grew up calling her vinca, a pretty little two-syllable name, taken from her proper Latin binomial, Vinca minor. My mother cultivated periwinkle in our forested Massachusetts backyard, encouraging the hardy green vines to trail over the boulders and under the ferns. I would have been delighted to know even a fraction of vinca lore back then, but I knew nothing except she was poison. I could eat the royal-purple dog violets, but I was not to pick the vinca. Vinca was poison and poison meant death. This, it turns out, is false. It’s one of the many easy assumptions of childhood. I thought all plants that grew in my yard were meant to be there, and I thought all poisonous things were bad. Vinca—or periwinkle or creeping myrtle or dogbane, as she’s also called—is invasive to North America. It chokes out other plants, stealing too many nutrients for native ground cover to grow. Many New England gardeners do not plant it for this reason. Yet I grow it, partially because I know what it can do, what it has done. Charlotte Berrington, Vinca Minor Vinca contains alkaloids, which can be terribly bad for you if ingested in the form of a flowering vine. If you’re a dog and you munch several vinca vines, it could kill you. But let’s say you have cancer. Let’s say its lymphoma and you’re my husband and I can’t imagine the world without you, can’t imagine what would happen if the small, hard tumors nestled around your collarbone took your life. For three hours every two weeks, you go and sit in a room with other patients, other sick people who have lost their hair and their eyebrows. Together, you get alkaloids injected into your veins. You live because there is a medicine made from Madagascar periwinkle (a close relative of Vinca minor) that can kill cancer cells and cure your blood disease. You live because something poisonous can also be healing, an invasive species can also be curative—for a landscape and its people. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Portrait of Madame Monet, ca. 1872–74 Vinca is a complex little plant, and periwinkle, named for its blossoms, is an equally complex color. A subset of violet, which is a subset of purple, periwinkle denotes a precise shade that appears somewhat brighter than lavender, bluer than lilac, clearer than mauve, and dimmer than amethyst. But it’s hard to say with precision, because the purples are strange ones, polarizing, and violets are even more so. Few hues are more beguiling and more reviled than this grouping, the last stop on the rainbow and the tacked-on v at the end of that schoolchild’s mnemonic, Roy G. Biv. According to the scholar David Scott Kastan, shades of violet exist within their own special category. Violet is, like glaucous, a color-word that denotes a certain quality of light. “Violet seems to differ from purple in whatever language—not so much as a different shade of color than as something more luminous: perhaps a purple lit from within,” Kastan writes in On Color, his 2018 book on the subject. “Violet is the shimmering, fugitive color of the sky at sunset, purple the assertive substantial color of imperial robes.” This latter kind of purple—reddish, bold, saturated—has been bedecking the backs of the rich since its discovery by the Phoenicians, who were milking snails for their secretions long before the Common Era began. Known as Tyrian purple (supposedly for Tyre, in present-day Lebanon), Phoenician red, or imperial purple, it even has a heroic myth about its “discovery.” According to Roman scholar Julius Pollux, Hercules’s dog was the first creature to discover the pretty color hidden under those predatory shell-dwelling creatures (Peter Paul Rubens painted his vision of this event in Hercules’s Dog Discovers Purple Dye). Hercules had been on his way to court a nymph named Tyro, and when he got to her abode, she took one look at the stained dog and asked for a gown the same color as his mouth. Thus, Hercules was granted the glory of “inventing” Tyrian purple. The nymph, meanwhile, went on to get raped by Poseidon. (“And by the beach-run, Tyro, / Twisted arms of the sea-god, / Lithe sinews of water, gripping her, cross-hold,” wrote Ezra Pond in the Cantos.) Christ, Byzantine Mosaic, 1320 Tyrian purple was a difficult color to manufacture. Thousands of snails were required to create a single ounce of dye. In first-century Rome, a pound of Tyrian purple cost “about half a Roman soldier’s annual salary, or the equivalent of the cost of a diamond engagement ring today,” according to a 2019 exhibition from the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan. While it was possible to mix other dyes and pigments to create shades of purple, Tyrian remained the most significant color until the invention of “mauveine.” This, too, was an accidental invention, though we have more documentation about the creation of mauve than we do of Tyrian purple’s. In 1856, teenage chemist William Perkin was attempting to create quinine for a university assignment when he discovered his black, tarry mess had a purple tint. He patented the formula and soon it became the first chemical dye to be mass-produced. Samples of the early mauveine dye show it to be a bright reddish purple, vivid and intense. It is a bit less brown than Tyrian purple, but it clearly exists in the same color family. It’s a purple, a true one. According to the historian Sarah Lowengard, author of The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe, “modern American English” tends to consider purple and violet synonymous, “as simply red plus blue.” But that wasn’t always true: “In eighteenth-century conventions, purple has more red (r + r + b) and violet more blue (r + b + b); one can have light and dark violet as well as light and dark purple.” Claude Monet, Impression, Soleil Levant, 1872 Violet was deeply significant to the impressionist painters of Europe—and deeply offensive to their critics. Kastan pinpoints Monet’s Impression, Soleil Levant (1872) as the inciting incident in the critics’ war against this artistic use of the shade. “Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape,” wrote Louis Leroy after his eyes were subjected to the wishy-washy scene. It’s a painting of the ocean, but it’s a painting about color. It’s about misty gray blues and light violets. The same could be said for Monet’s Water Lilies series or Pissarro’s winter landscapes or Renoir’s crowd paintings or even J. M. W. Turner’s turbulent marine paintings. The more adventurous art galleries in 1870s Paris were filled with blurry landscapes, portraits, and still lifes, tied together by their techniques (thick layers of wet paint applied to wet paint) and their strange, almost surreal colors. To twenty-first-century eyes, these images look ordinary, but critics were unimpressed. Human skin, lamented the members of the artistic establishment, had turned green and purple and orange. Naturalism had been abandoned in favor of these periwinkle monstrosities. Edgar Degas, Young Girl Braiding Her Hair, 1894 Periwinkle’s first known appearance in English as a color-word was in the 1920s, but it has been in the painter’s toolbox for far longer, nestled under the violet umbrella. Periwinkle is a Modernist word for a Modernist color. It’s a word that has several meanings—in addition to being a flowering plant, a periwinkle is also a type of snail, though not, confusingly, one that secretes purple liquid. It’s a nature word for a color most often found in nature. A dreamy word for a color that exists at the edges of the night. Edgar Degas, Portrait of Giulia Bellelli (Sketch), 1860 While the Impressionists are perhaps the most beloved of the nineteenth-century artist-innovators—their vague flowers make for good merch—there were other movements bubbling alongside. One of these less-remembered movements was symbolism, an artistic practice that predated (but perhaps predicted) the surrealist boom of the twentieth century, combining elements of sublime Romanticism and Rococo drama with Modernist abstraction techniques to create works that were intense, often quite ornate, stylized, and, above all, dreamy. In contrast to the Impressionists, who painted from nature and labored to show exactly how we experience colors in the wild (hence all those violet sunsets), the symbolists thought you had to inject a little unreality in art in order to get the viewer closer to experiencing a universal truth. They wanted to show what love felt like or what madness meant, so they painted worlds that were stuffed full of references to stories and (naturally) symbols. They revered Greek mythology and were heavily influenced by pagan religions in general—for the symbolists, spirituality was far more important to art than naturalism. While the Impressionists (a movement based largely in Paris) and the symbolists (a movement that flourished in Central and Northern Europe) had very different goals, both groups relied heavily on certain colors—chief among them the secondary hues, the marigolds, the emeralds, the tangerines, and, of course, the violets. Edvard Munch, Mermaid, 1896 My interest in symbolism arose alongside a newfound interest in sunsets. Both of these obsessions were quarantine-born. I once laughed at sunset paintings and sunset pictures—so obvious and ordinary. But lately, I’ve found myself waiting for the sun to go down, timing my walks so that I can be outside then, when the bats begin to swoop around the oaks and the mosquitoes hum around my face. It’s not the golden hour (which occurs about an hour before the sun touches the horizon), it’s the periwinkle window. It lasts only a few minutes in the summertime; dusk descends fast in the north. But for fifteen minutes, the sky is painted with various shades of violet, indigo, and mauve. At dawn and dusk, my tiny little dead-end road becomes another place, quieter than during the daylight hours, but visually much louder. Jan Toorop, Old Oaks in Surrey, 1890 And after the sun had set, while trying to lull my baby to sleep, I immersed myself in the works of Nicholas Roerich, Edvard Munch, and Jan Toorop on my phone. Unlike Impressionist pieces with their heavy ridges of paint and texture, symbolist pieces seem made for a screen. They’re often flat, with broad swaths of contrasting colors (think of Klimt’s quilt-like surfaces or Gauguin’s two-dimensional flowers). Some of these paintings are a bit cartoony, kind of childlike, something you might see in a children’s book alongside a nursery rhyme. Sometimes, these paintings are heart-achingly lovely. Mostly they’re a bit mad. Naked women dance in periwinkle twilight, demons garden in golden fields, one-eyed monsters rise from a backdrop of flowers, and lovers kiss in a flat, jeweled world. Nicholas Roerich, The Call of the Sun, 1919 I slowly came to love these images from the same reserve of feeling that I held for dusk. Scrolling through painting after painting felt a bit like picking flowers. Even the sinister pictures, the poison blossoms, were still so pretty. I spoke their language and understood their references. I could see where they came from, what they were trying to do. Recently, after spending months thinking about this color and this flower, I emailed Kastan to ask whether he still loves violet and whether he had any thoughts on periwinkle. We’d met once at a color-related event,and struck up a friendship based on my color stories, his color book. He replied, writing from a house in Rhode Island, “Periwinkle seems the color of grace, and not least because of the flower’s modest ordinariness.” So much is changing, he wrote, “but there is always color—it is the promise of joy.” Read more of Katy Kelleher’s color stories here. Katy Kelleher is a writer who lives in the woods of rural New England with her two dogs and one husband. She is the author of Handcrafted Maine.
June 13, 2019 Hue's Hue Mustard, the Color of Millennial Candidates, Problematic Lattes, and Aboriginal Paintings By Katy Kelleher PHOTO: SUZANNE CORDEIRO/AFP/GETTY IMAGES. Late last year, I found myself in a meeting with three other women, and we were all dressed identically. Blue jeans of various washes, clumpy, Chelsea-style black boots with pull-on tabs, parkas (shed over the backs of our chairs), and mustard yellow sweaters. We noticed it and laughed. “This is the only kind of yellow I wear,” said a woman with wispy blonde hair. “It’s the only one that looks good on me.” Is this brownish, orangey yellow universally flattering? Considering how many people I see wearing it, it must be. (Or perhaps we’ve decided, en masse, that what’s “flattering” no longer matters.) The mustard craze of the late 2010s appears to have started on runways and in boutiques, but it quickly made its way into home goods and other consumer products. You can buy mustard yellow midcentury modern couches from hip start-ups and mustard yellow lamps from high-end designers. There are condiment-colored cashmeres hanging off bespoke hangers in brick-and-mortar shops, and condiment-colored acrylic blends for sale online at Target. It’s become surprisingly ubiquitous—especially for a color that leans so far toward brown. This isn’t a primary, playful, dandelion-bright yellow. It isn’t the color of daffodils or spring or blooms. It’s too murky for that. This is the color of late-summer allergies, well-stocked pantries, and hashtag-adulting. It’s the color of pest-deterring marigolds and over-tall crops. It’s a harvest color, one that normally shows up later in the year, when the grasses have begun to dry and wild turkeys have begun to roam into the road. But this year, instead of waiting for its season to return, mustard hung around. It stuck around through winter and now, when pastels and florals typically get their turn, that mustard stain remains. Read More
April 10, 2019 Hue's Hue Flowers for Yellow Chins, Bruised Eyes, Forsaken Nymphs, and Impending Death By Katy Kelleher From Francesca DiMattio’s portfolio of ceramics in The Paris Review’s Spring 2019 issue (Photo: Robert Bredvad). Once you start knowing the names of plants, your landscape changes entirely. Trees are no longer just trees—they’re maples and aspens and silver birches. Meadows aren’t filled with blue, yellow, and red wildflowers—they’re home to chicory and buttercups and fireweed. Knowing the names of things also allows you to see and name patterns. You start to realize that those thin-stemmed flowers with feathered, three-lobed leaves that you saw at the florist look an awful lot like the skinny little weeds that bolt up from the sidewalk near your house. You start to see how blossoms with swirls of intricately layered petals can be the sisters of flowers with just five lemon-yellow petals. When you begin to learn their various names, you begin to understand how their roots intertwine, how their histories align, how their mythology has been built, layer by layer, over the centuries. A rose by another name may still be a rose, but a buttercup, when called by another name, tells an entirely new story. “Coyote’s eyes” is a relatively common folk name for buttercups, and it’s possible this name comes from the simple fact that coyotes have yellow-gold eyes that glow in the dark. They’re one of the first flowers that many people learn to identify, thanks to the old “Do you like butter?” game, which involves holding a buttercup under the chin of a child. If their chin shines yellow (it almost always does—buttercups have reflective petals) then the answer is affirmative. It’s the kind of cutesy nonsense that adults foist on kids and that kids, being smarter than most people, quickly abandon. Read More
January 18, 2019 Hue's Hue Living Coral, the Brutal Hue of Climate Change and Brand New iPhones By Katy Kelleher Coral outcrop on Flynn Reef The color forecasters at Pantone have declared 2019 the year of Living Coral. In the press release, the company describes this orangey pink hue as “vibrant, yet mellow,” providing “warmth,” “buoyancy,” “nourishment,” and “comfort.” Reading the release is a bit disconcerting. According to Pantone, Living Coral can both release us from the grips of “digital technology” while retaining a “lively presence on social media.” This color reminds us equally of snorkeling and scrolling, the company seems to suggest. It’s a natural hue—and a digital one. Pantone calls the color “life-affirming,” a bitterly ironic statement, considering the continued annihilation we’re inflicting on these small animals. Read More