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I was recently back at the family farm (which is in the Ohio Valley). Since I almost never go there in late autumn it gave me a precious opportunity to see some of my favorite trees wearing their brilliant fall raiment. Unfortunately I am no photographer–and I never found the time to paint a watercolor painting of autumn’s beauty–however I wanted to share the two most magnificent trees.
Here is the bald cypress which we planted to emulate grandpa’s bald cypress in Weston (which was apparently chopped down the moment he left his house). This tree is a young bald cypress, and it would still be in middle school if it was a human (which fortunately it is not, since it would be a dull child standing beside a goose pond all day), however it is already beginning to develop the knobby swamp knees and flying buttresses characteristic of the great cathedral cypresses of the southern swamp. It is maybe 6 meters (20 feet tall) and it is growing fast. I wish I could have captured the beauty of its warm orange fronds, because in the setting sun they glowed like it was a little ember from the November sun. I wish I could explain to you how winsome the tree is. There is something about all of the Cupressaceae which makes one want to hug them like a robe wearing lunatic from Northern California.
The second tree was my parents’ first choice of trees to plant and it is beginning to reach stunning maturity. It is a pecan tree and it is starting to produce nuts. You can’t see how large it is, but it probably about 13 or 14 meters (45 plus feet) and it is also growing fast. Sadly I could not capture its size with pictures (I need a giraffe or a basketball player to go stand beside it), but when you are near it, you now get a feeling of awe–in addition to whatever appreciation you have for its graceful lines and lovely proportions. There are larger trees back in the forest, but they are forest oaks, walnuts, and hickory which grow tall and straight and do not spread like the glorious pecan. Pecan trees are capable of growing to 40 meters (130 feet) in height with a spread of 22 meters (75 feet) so we will keep hoping that none of the freakish storms which have been growing in number and strength bedevil either of these beloved trees before they reach that kind of height. I wish you could actually see these trees–they are so beautiful!
It is Thanksgiving week and Ferrebeekeeper has a couple of little appetizer articles planned to post here before the great feast, however, before we get to those, I would like to talk about something which I have only become truly thankful for of late in life. Devout readers know that I love colors and I sometimes rue America’s puritan distrust of brilliant scintillating colors (I was recently at an airport in Richmond and everyone there was wearing black, blue, white or oatmeal!). Wouldn’t life be better if it was like a tropical coral reef or a city in Tamil Nadu?
Except, for some reason this year the Thanksgiving color palette is calling to me with a greater allure than it has ever possessed. Among the holiday color palettes Thanksgiving is the odd one out. New Years is gold, silver, and jewel-tones. Valentine’s day is bright red and hot pink. Saint Patrick’s Day is Kelly green and gold. Easter is a rainbow of cheerful pastels. Summer colors are superhero colors of red, blue, white, yellow, and green. Halloween is orange, black, purple and green. Christmas is red, green, and gold. However, Thanksgiving is russet, burgundy, harvest gold, and drab. It’s like a sheet set from 1975! Except now I see that within that rainbow of brown is the stubble in the autumn fields, and the feathers of buff turkeys, and the g;owing leaves of the bald cypress before they fall away.
Throughout my life I have chafed at the earth toned hues of autumn, but suddenly they seem more beautiful than I can ever remember. It is like they are not trying to sell some god-forsaken novelty or social pretense but are are simply the colors of Mother Earth herself.
Anyway, I don’t have a bigger point–although my other posts this week are related to this and come to think of it, lately my artwork has changed to reflect the somber beauty of the autumn woodlands too. Maybe I am finally coming to except that I will never be a triggerfish or a macaw and must be content to be an olive flounder or a tawny owl…or maybe the next season will reveal a new set of colors which delight me and my tastes will keep changing like the seasons and the years.
Back in college I took a course on planetary and atmospheric dynamics. Although I don’t recall the course as well as I should (the class was extremely mathematical for my taste), one concept which has remained with me is is “albedo”–how well the planetary surface reflects solar radiation back into space. Albedo was a strange wild card in everyone’s computer models of planetary temperature and climate. Small changes in planetary albedo could lead to big temperature changes across the globe (as say when high-albedo ice sheets melt or when reflective white clouds form). Albedo isn’t just important in astrophysics: how well a surface reflects or absorbs radiant energy has engineering and economic implications down here at a human scale as well.
This awkward lede is an attempt to contextualize the potentially enormous importance of today’s color-themed topic. Researchers at Purdue University have invented a very, very bright shade of white paint. The color is so white that it reflects 98.1 percent of visible light. The color (which lacks a name, but should be called something like “great white”, “polar bare”, or “super dazzle”) is so radiant that surfaces painted with the compound are cooler than the ambient temperature of things around them. It is the polar opposite (snicker) of the ultra-black developed a few years ago.
The secret to this color is a molecular engineering trick. Barium sulfate is a safe and commonly used white pigment for makeup and coated papers. Engineers created a range of microscopically sized barium sulfate particles and then combined these differently sized particles into a single coating. The result was this glistening mirror white.
Now I can’t show you this color in a photo (since it wouldn’t make any sense on the luminous medium of your computer screen), but I get the sense that, like that super black, it has an unearthly look to it in the real world. Speaking of the real world there is no news yet on practical or saleable applications of the incredible ultra white (which makes me think it might prove hard to produce at scale). Yet the fact that it exists is exciting for engineers (and artists too). Let’s get to work making some more of this stuff so we can find out if is any good…and so we know whether we can solve our climate problems by painting Nevada and the Kumtag Desert shiny white!
One of my favorite colors is disgusting–even its name is gross. Yet, as with most aesthetically ugly things, there is something otherworldly, compelling and…beautiful (?) about it too. I am speaking of acid green, a goblin-ish haunted color somewhere between bright yellow and brownish green (although, lately, contemporary car manufacturers are trying to present fluorescent neon green as acid green).
The real acid green is a sort of dirty, unwholesome chartreuse. Although this color was big in the sixties, its name does not come from Lysergic acid diethylamide, but rather from stomach acid (which, uh, isn’t really green–the real name for this color should be bile green).
Acid green somehow does not look like a natural green anyway, but like something that came out of an industrial vat or was summoned into being by a necromancer. It is this ersatz anti-green feeling which makes the color appealing. Grandma Connie liked to refer to things as acid green or include it in her stories. Come to think of it, Grandma had a real fondness for that color too (or near variants through the years like avocado (70s), chiffon (50s), green apple (80s) and so forth). Because she was so elegant and good at using colors, I always thought of it as an elegant color. Maybe I inherited the affection for the color from Grandma. I wish I had asked her where she first started to like this yellow green. Maybe it is an affinity stretching over the generations. Do you have colors that male you think of people too?
There is an enormous hexagonal storm on the north pole of Saturn which is large enough to drop the Earth into. Ferrebeekeeper has long been fascinated by this giant yet geometrically-regular storm, and that was before we learned that the hexastorm…changes color!
Like Earth, Saturn is tilted, and, as with Earth, the tilt affects how much sunlight reaches different hemispheres of the planet as it proceeds around the sun. Since Saturn is rather farther from the sun than the Earth is, a Saturn “year” lasts for 29 Earth years. Due to this somewhat lengthened calendar (and because we have only recently acquired some of the necessary tools to study other planets) the seasonal variances on Saturn are only now being recognized.
Using the Hubble Space telescope, scientists have been keeping an eye on Saturn’s seasons (each of which last for 7.25 years). As summer in the northern hemisphere changes to fall, the color of the atmosphere is changing and so are the appearances of the bands within the atmosphere. NASA scientists speculate that increased sunlight may lead to increased photochemical hazes in the atmosphere which causes the shift from winter blue to summer gold. As we continue to study Saturn in years to come, it will be interesting to see how much of this color shift is seasonal and how much it changes based on larger cycles.
The colors we use to make art and artifacts tend to reflect the affairs of the time in a way which is hard to quickly characterize (but which jumps out at you if you wonder though a really comprehensive museum like the Met). Thus cave paintings are made with ochre; Roman textiles are made with decayed molluscs; Han funerary art is made with sophisticated kiln-fired purple; and Victorian wallpaper is made of industrial poisons. During the twentieth century a broad range of sophisticated (albeit not-always-perfect and often fugitive) pigments came onto the market and pushed the nineteenth century colors like Hooker’s green and Prussian blue to the back of the box. But what about the 21st century? Do we have anything yet other than a disconcerting black which is so dark and expensive it is hard to comprehend?
Yes! Back in 2009, pigment makers discovered how to synthesize a new blue out of rare earth elements yttrium, indium, and manganese (my tube of manganese blue–the color of a tropical swimming pool–is probably my favorite blue in my paint box, but I don’t use it a whole lot). The new blue is known by the not-very-pronounceable name of YInMn blue and is finally reaching the shelves of art supply stores (albeit at exorbitant costs). According to artists who have used it, it is delightful because it is so opaque (this perhaps doesn’t sound exciting until you start seeing all of your drawings and paintings turn into muddy, fussy messes).
One of the more interesting things about YinMn blue is that it is strongly extraspectral/hyper-spectral and reflects frequencies of electromagnetic radiation which are not visual to humans. The pigment does not just strongly reflect blue light, it strongly reflects infrared radiation (which may mean we will be seeing all sorts of stunningly blue refrigerated cartons and devices). Naturally I can’t really show you this color on a computer, but we can look at pictures and they make me excited for a future where this is cheap enough that impoverished Brooklyn artist/bloggers can get their hands on it!
Today we feature an obscure color which used to be well known and frequently written about. Isabelline, also known as “isabella,” is a pale, silvery yellowish-gray. The name for the color is older than most color names in English and dates back to the Elizabethan era (circa 1600). There are several compelling (but non-definitive) explanations of the etymology of the word. My favorite explanation is that Infanta Isabella, a Spanish noblewoman vowed never to change her snow white garb until her husband, Archduke Albert of Austria, was victorious in conquering Ostend, a Protestant stronghold in Flanders. A hasty victory was expected, however, the city’s Dutch defenders were reinforced and supplied from the sea by the English and the siege lasted for three brutal years, by which time the Infanta’s gown was a very organic yellow-gray. The story is probably apocryphal but it is nearly old as the color itself (and it draws our attention to the Siege of Ostend, which was as brutal and bloody as it was historically interesting).
This Spanish connection of the name hints at why the English of the early 17th century were so excited by yellow-gray to begin with. Isabella is a color of horses, an unparalleled fascination for people of that time! In modern horse terms, such steeds are pale palomino or cremello, but the hue isn’t too far off from ancestral grullo (these horse color names all seem to have a late medieval Spanish flair don’t they?). At any rate, even though isabella is a common color for living things, it is perhaps not of not of paramount beauty to the jaded modern eye and the word has been gradually fading from usage. This strikes me as a pity, since it is a much better word for that organic yellow-gray than uh, “yellow-gray.”
The Peasant and the Birdnester (Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1568) oil on panel
Ferrebeekeeper has blogged a great deal about fancy modern colors like folly, Mountbatten pink, mauve, and greenery. The names and high-falutin’ synthetic chemistry underlying the pigmentation of these faddish vogue colors really is quite recent (in the grand scheme of things I mean). Today though, to celebrate autumn, we have a very beautiful color which has an ancient name (which goes back to at least Middle English). According to color theorists, russet is a tertiary color–the result of combining purple and orange. What this means in practice is that russet is a medium dark reddish-brown which looks like the floor of a forest or the unswept corners of a poultry yard. We know the word was around at least in 1363, because an English statute of that year required poor people to wear russet (although it may have been referring to a coarse woolen cloth dyed with woad and madder which, for a time was synonymous with the color).
Despite its associations with the hempen homespun smallfolk (or perhaps because of it), russet has an astonishing literary history. The first scene of the first act of Hamlet ends when “the morn, in russet mantle clad, walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.” Russet, being a somber earthen color, was associated with autumn, death, and mourning (which is perhaps why we find it in the haunted scene in Hamlet). Cromwell also referred to the color when he preferred a disciplined and seasoned captain in russet (e.g. a commoner with a commission) to a noble soldier “which you call a gentleman and is nothing else.”
A Bearded Old Man, Wearing a Brown Coat and Russet Hat(Rembrandt van Rijn, 1651) Oil on Canvas
There is also an artistic truth behind the color which is painful for the excitable young artist to grasp. Drawings made in medium and dark browns have a way of coming out far more beautifully than drawings made with brighter and more fashionable colors. When I was young I kept making drawings with violet or blood red. Why didn’t I listen to Shakespeare and Cromwell and use russet. Courtiers of the 14th century may have sneered at it (and brown is perhaps still not the most chic color on the catwalk) but it is beautiful and it suits living things very well…which is good, for here in the temperate northern world we are about to embark upon an entire season of russet.
Ok, I’ll admit it, maybe I still have some “panda-monium” in my system from Tuesday’s announcement about the 2022 Olympic mascot, Bing Dwen Dwen, an adorable panda wearing some sort of ice hauberk. To follow up on that post, here is a picture of a baby panda in China which was just born with white and gray fur. What’s the story here?
Now everyone knows that pandas are black and white (except for the red panda, which is really a whole different sort of animal), however it turns out there are a couple of mysterious off-color giant panda clans out there in the bamboo forests. Apparently a family from Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding sometimes has gray and white cubs. Pandas from the so-called Gray family look wise beyond their years at first but then turn to normal white and black as they grow into adulthood. Here is Chengshi, another gray-and-white cub born a few years ago who matured into a lovely black-and -white goofball.
However, the Gray family of color-changing gray pandas is not the most dramatic clan of differently colored giant pandas.
This is Qi Zai, the world’s only captive brown and white panda. Qi Zai is from the distant Qinling Mountains in Shaanxi, where a subspecies of brown and white pandas appropriately known as Qinling pandas are known to reside. Qinling pandas are rarely spotted in the forest fastnesses of their remote home. The pandas are reputedly somewhat smaller (and more sensitive) than their black-and-white relatives. Zoologists are still arguing about how to classify the brown and white pandas (are they a true sub-species, or just an unusual family), but it seems like they are certainly the rarest of the rare. It is is estimated that only 200-300 exist in the whole world.
Hey remember last week when NASA’s robot spacecraft visited a remote double snowball in the farthest reaches of the solar system? Well that was amazing, but there was an attendant nomenclature problem. Internet space enthusiasts and NASA worked together to choose a proposed name for the flying space snowman, and they came up with “Ultima Thule”, which was the Roman name for the inaccessible frozen lands of the farthest north (inaccessible to Romans anyway). This name, however, doesn’t become official until sanctioned by the International Astronomical Union, which faces a conundrum, since apparently Nazis stupidly believed (or stupidly claimed to believe) that the Aryan race came from a mythical wonderland called Thule.
This is clearly one of those stories that illustrate the dizzying heights of grandeur and terrifying depths of folly which accompany the human condition. It is also an opportunity for a Ferrebeekeeper post about color since Thulian is also the English name for pink. “Thulian pink” is a striking pale pink with lavender highlights which will be instantly familiar to anyone who has gone down the girl’s toy aisle at a big box store. Apparently the first recorded usage of this color name was in 1912, which was before the terrible events of the twenties and thirties swept a white nationalist autocracy to power in Germany. Thulian pink doesn’t seem to have any white nationalist undertones that I can fathom (although I guess ruddy complexioned Caucasian people like me could theoretically turn the color of a Barbie Dream house if we received esoteric radiation burns or drank something toxic). Words are funny…(also I wonder if we sometimes invest them with too much power as we try to protect people from the ignorance and meanness of other people). Anyway Thulian pink is also named after the fantastic lands to the far north, which makes me wonder what the association was for the people who first coined the name? Is this the pink of the northern lands under the midnight sun at high summer or is it just regarded as an otherworldly color or ARE there unknown horrible racist associations? What is going on?
Anyway, apparently this hue was rechristened as “First Lady” in 1948 as the interior decorators of the 50s started using it for everything. I have always called in “Pepto-Bismol” pink. Whatever it is called, I have always like the color, although it gets a trifle overused in the gendered marketing scheme of today’s toy world.
ferrebeekeeper 