Kobe #45 And #49 - Two Stone Greens

March 8, 2022

17 hours ago, pgcauk said:

I have my latest cosmology here: https://www.artmajeur.com/philip-guest

I like your hat, sir. Is that the jacket from Transylvania or a different blue jacket?

March 8, 2022

1 hour ago, airstairesc said:

What colour was his jacket?

Boring color! Balding man in normal clothes, but he had that quizzical twinkle.

My hat is magical! It once belonged to Snufkin, I believe, but that is a regular plastic raincoat - serves a purpose but does not elevate the heart like the Transylvanian sky blue.

Expanding on blue as the color of thought, (leading through wishes and dreams in the violets to emotions in magenta) my inks told me that turquoise and teals would be colors for enquiry, or interrogative observation, whereas olives and yellow greens are colors of service.

Yellow, of course, is the self being lost in outer experience, red is the self asserting itself overruling experience!

Color cosmologies are fun! Everyone should have one!

March 9, 2022

1 hour ago, pgcauk said:

Boring color! Balding man in normal clothes, but he had that quizzical twinkle.

My hat is magical! It once belonged to Snufkin, I believe, but that is a regular plastic raincoat - serves a purpose but does not elevate the heart like the Transylvanian sky blue.

Expanding on blue as the color of thought, (leading through wishes and dreams in the violets to emotions in magenta) my inks told me that turquoise and teals would be colors for enquiry, or interrogative observation, whereas olives and yellow greens are colors of service.

Yellow, of course, is the self being lost in outer experience, red is the self asserting itself overruling experience!

Color cosmologies are fun! Everyone should have one!

Your inks are wise!

I've never heard of colour cosmologies. What is it and how can I get one?

Also, should we start a new thread, or is there one already about Color Cosmology?

March 9, 2022

2 hours ago, airstairesc said:

Color Cosmology

Totally made it up!

. . . But I do think everyone should have one.

I think I prefer the idea of them being personal rather than Universal. People lucky enough to have synesthesia don't share a universal language. What color is the number 7? For some people this is absolute, but also individual.

I do have your "Tranquility" answer too. It's a good one, possibly a life changer, but I need to wait until I'm in the main engine room...

Got there! It's from here:

https://www.biroco.com/yijing/richmond.htm

Best book never published! I printed out the online copies and had them bound into books. Awesome. Worth learning by heart, and then writing your own version!

I have always found it fascinating that Leibniz came up with binary code, and hence modern computing, after encountering the I Ching, yet I find far more wisdom in the old oracle than in the "Artificial Intelligence" of today!

March 9, 2022

2 hours ago, pgcauk said:

Totally made it up!

. . . But I do think everyone should have one.

I think I prefer the idea of them being personal rather than Universal. People lucky enough to have synesthesia don't share a universal language. What color is the number 7? For some people this is absolute, but also individual.

I do have your "Tranquility" answer too. It's a good one, possibly a life changer, but I need to wait until I'm in the main engine room...

Got there! It's from here:

https://www.biroco.com/yijing/richmond.htm

Best book never published! I printed out the online copies and had them bound into books. Awesome. Worth learning by heart, and then writing your own version!

I have always found it fascinating that Leibniz came up with binary code, and hence modern computing, after encountering the I Ching, yet I find far more wisdom in the old oracle than in the "Artificial Intelligence" of today!

Thank you for the link!

How did you go about your investigation with the colours? Is it like a form of meditation, guided mostly by intuition?

edit:

I know you made it up, but did a process emerge eventually?

March 9, 2022

42 minutes ago, airstairesc said:

How did you go about your investigation with the colours? Is it like a form of meditation, guided mostly by intuition?

Honestly, from your writing I think you're there already! Intuition for sure, but it's also empirical - write a page in red and see how that feels! OK so red isn't for drafts of your novel, but it does have a unique presence so how can we work with red rather than against it? Yellow the same, but different, no-one would write in yellow, but it's the ultimate highlighter color - what does this mean? For some reason I would call it listening to colors, the visual is all about surfaces, but listening goes deeper?

I am a student of Goethe and Steiner, who have plenty to say about color, but I don't accept any authority other than the colors'!

I think I am particularly drawn to Green and Violet as they are the transition points between warm, ingressive colors and the (much less explored) cool, recessive zone.

I do believe most color theory is not so great. I do have time for Ostwald. The Royal Society told Newton his presentation was obvious poppycock, yet somehow it got stuck. The "Dark Side Of The Moon" cover might be wonderful graphics, but in terms of optics it's buncombe!

On a bit of a tear, but thankfully it's supper time! Goodnight!

March 9, 2022

2 hours ago, pgcauk said:

For some reason I would call it listening to colors, the visual is all about surfaces, but listening goes deeper?

What you just wrote reminded me of something I read the other day:

"The human body is perhaps nothing more than an appearance. It conceals our reality. It solidifies over the light and shadow of our life. The reality is the soul. In absolute terms, our face is a mask. The real man is what exists under the man. If we were able to perceive that man crouching, sheltered, behind that illusion that we call the flesh, we should have many a surprise. The common error is to take the external being for the real one."

(Victor Hugo, The Toilers of the Sea)

Color Cosmology sounds like working to perceive the colour that is crouching, sheltered, behind the illusion that we call, say, ROYGBIV, and yes, many surprises!

The process strikes me as forensic in nature, only disembodied and abstract. Anyway, I think my perception is intact, but the real toil for me is going to be with articulation.

2 hours ago, pgcauk said:

I think I am particularly drawn to Green and Violet as they are the transition points between warm, ingressive colors and the (much less explored) cool, recessive zone.

Cool, recessive...

“The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white.” (Kandinsky)

Yves Klein was into cosmology, too. He said this about blue:

"Blue has no dimensions; it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not... All colours arouse specific associative ideas while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract."

He speaks definitively, but only for himself. Do you have any thoughts about his quote? Specifically this part: "All colours arouse specific associative ideas."

2 hours ago, pgcauk said:

I do believe most color theory is not so great. I do have time for Ostwald. The Royal Society told Newton his presentation was obvious poppycock, yet somehow it got stuck. The "Dark Side Of The Moon" cover might be wonderful graphics, but in terms of optics it's buncombe!

On a bit of a tear, but thankfully it's supper time! Goodnight!

Have you done many of these types of tears elsewhere on FPN? I'll have to do a proper search soon.

I also came across this. Just skimmed it but leaving it here for future reference and study and tearing:

https://artwizard.eu/wassily-kandinsky---how-the-blue-color-sounds-ar-93

March 9, 2022

4 hours ago, pgcauk said:

I am a student of Goethe and Steiner, who have plenty to say about color, but I don't accept any authority other than the colors'!

I asked the Psychology professor teaching a 'Sensation and Perception' course I was taking about the importance of our phenomenological experience of color (as well as other perceptual experience) and she looked at me as if I was crazy and ignored my question ...

Getting back to the comparison with Ambient Music, at least at what Eno was trying to get at with Music for Airports:

The fundamental tasks in 'normal' writing are to convey meaning via writing and to understand via reading, just as the tasks in airports include checking in, checking luggage, getting to a terminal, waiting on an airplane, getting to the baggage pickup, etc., at least from a traveler's perspective. Just as Ambient Music contains various idiosyncrasies that foster interesting and various experiences of it, while also fostering calm and enabling thought and not being intrusive on attention to a task, I am, in general, looking for colors that are both interesting, enable calm and thought (especially since I am not writing a 'call to arms', a torrid romance, or some such - it's not in my usual nature to shout or otherwise try to activate the limbic system of others, nor my own), don't distract attention, and support the task, i. e. 'normal' writing and reading (i.e. not calligraphy or other artistry). Still, the written text should still be able stand on its own visually outside its primary context of conveying/understanding meaning and color has a large part in this. It's a difficult to define, constrained color space with, I believe, a lot of freedom within it.

[What was playing in the background as I wrote the above:

]

March 9, 2022

6 hours ago, airstairesc said:

“The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite,

I recently had the feeling that while red and it's warm associates step forward from the page, pushing into the personal space of the reader, blue lies behind the page and calls us out of ourselves and the physical realm and into the realm of thought, which is boundless. Green and Violet are closer to the surface, but the subtleties of their variations makes it a lovely rippling surface!

Magenta might be approaching a red outburst, whereas purple can lie both behind the blue or be blue preparing to assume form, spirit approaching matter.

I don't think it's an arbitrary choice that we mainly write in blue, it's the perfect color for conveying thought.

In Colorado I saw the best wildflowers ever approaching the snow line at 14,000' in July and the sky if you looked straight up was violet, because there was not much air now between you and space!

Kobe #54 is the color I finally settled on for correcting students' work. I could never impose red so I worked my way through pinks and oranges; Fernambuk in an ef nib or more recently Corail Des Tropiques, which, if I was a student, would make me look forward to receiving "corrections", but #54 is enough, more of a polite suggestion than an assertion... which is about where I am as a teacher, in awe at the creativity of the students, and possibly why I have quit that gig?

Maybe we rename this thread "The Grimoire"!

And Pithy, I think there's a clue for me in your Eno quote as to why I use the Greek Alphabet so much, I tried colors on their own (like drawing or painting) or building landscapes out of colored words, which is the current state of my notebooks, but it's quite apparent that the words are to be looked at rather than read, so the alphabet is a great form for me, sequenced writing but the meaning is contained more in the color than in the words.

Great work team! Thank you!

March 10, 2022

18 hours ago, PithyProlix said:

I asked the Psychology professor teaching a 'Sensation and Perception' course I was taking about the importance of our phenomenological experience of color (as well as other perceptual experience) and she looked at me as if I was crazy and ignored my question ...

It's treated a bit like the common cold, "Not much to see here, far more interesting topics further down the corridor!"

I have spent a good while sat in a chair, drinking tea and gazing out of the window, and it seems to me that:

The material world is a wonderful and extraordinary thing.

The living world of Nature is another level of triumph, drawing on the material in a series constantly developing and immensely varied transformations.

The emotional world arises within the living, but is not constrained by the material. In a way it is its own realm, deserving of its own cartography free from the rules of terrestrial geography and material physics. "The Cloud Atlas" was a nice book title, I thought!

And then we enter the realm of ideas, such as I am creating here, and who knows where the boundaries are? "As far as we know, we are the only instance where the Universe has become self conscious" writes James Lovelock, aged 100.

But then modern science and its attendant materialist culture try and reduce this tremendous edifice to its lowest layer, it's all just molecules and subdivisions of molecules after all?! Building up from the bottom might be a sensible strategy, but reducing everything down to the simplest elements is just destructive.

So color is a bit of an embarrassment, because it seems so intimately connected (along with music, but in a different way I think) to our emotional and spiritual experience. And "the authorities" are embarrassing. Newton didn't even get a passing grade and where are we now? "It's all waves, unless it's particles, well, maybe it flips, or is both . . . more interesting stuff further down the corridor."

I found a lovely water prism kit that I like to use in middle school that gives a set of optical experiences, and then a variety of contradictory historical pontificating as to what might be going on. You can choose your own favorite pontification, or make up your own, but the experiences are something quite marvelous that we can all agree on at least?

So, "Cartographers of the Astral Plane" - how's that for a name for this club? No physical meetings required, just ideas and feelings, ideally depicted through colored words!