Introducing Mr. Roy G. Biv

This post is especially for Adrian and Jeannelle of Iowa (not to be confused with Eleanor of Aquitaine) and Elizabeth Stanforth-Sharpe and Neil Theasby and every one of you who ever took a marvelous photograph and posted it in your blog. It is also for LightExpectations (who is a synesthete) and Helsie in Brisbane and Carol in Cairns (that’s in Far North Queensland, you know) and anyone else who has the least bit of artistic sensibility.

Here are some shades of red:

According to Wikipedia, red is the color of blood, rubies, and strawberries. It is commonly associated with danger, sacrifice, passion, fire, beauty, blood, anger, socialism and communism, and in China and many other cultures, with happiness.

Common connotations of red include love, hate, courage, martyrdom, force, heat, energy, happiness, well-being, aggression, anger, seduction, sexuality, eroticism, immorality, autumn, socialism, communism, passion, beauty, fire, masculinity, danger, blood, Christmas, and war.

Here are some shades of orange:

In Europe and America, orange is commonly associated with amusement, the unconventional, extroverts, fire, activity, danger, taste and aroma, the autumn season, and Protestantism. In Asia, it is an important symbolic colour of Buddhism and Hinduism.

Common connotations of orange include warning, autumn, desire, fire, Halloween, Thanksgiving, prisoners, Orangism (Netherlands), Unionism (Ireland), Indian religions, engineering, determination, compassion, endurance, and optimism.

Here are some shades of yellow:

Yellow is the color of gold, butter, ripe lemons, and ripe bananas. It is commonly associated with gold, sunshine, reason, optimism and pleasure, but also with envy, jealousy and betrayal. It plays an important part in Asian culture, particularly in China.

Common connotations of yellow include sunshine, warmth, fun, happiness, warning, friendship, caution, slow, cowardice, Mardi Gras, summer, lemons, Easter, autumn, spring, electricity, liberalism/libertarianism, hope, optimism, and imagination.

Here are some shades of green:

Green is the color of emeralds, jade, and growing grass. It is the color most commonly associated with nature and the environmental movement, Ireland, Islam, spring, hope, and envy.

Common connotations of green include nature, growth, grass, hope, youth, inexperience, health, sickness, Irish nationalism, Islam, spring, Saint Patrick’s Day, money (US), greed, and envy.

Here are some shades of blue:

Blue is the color of the clear sky and the deep sea.

Common connotations of blue include ice, water, sky, sadness, winter, police, royalty, Hanukkah, boys, cold, calm, magic, trueness, conservatism (outside the US). and liberalism (US).

Now we come to a disputed area, indigo.

Indigo is a color that was traditionally regarded as a color on the visible spectrum and as one of the seven colors of the rainbow: the color between blue and violet. Although traditionally considered one of seven major spectral colors, its actual position in the electromagnetic spectrum is controversial. Indigo is a deep and bright color close to the color wheel blue (a primary color in the RGB color space), as well as to some variants of ultramarine. The color indigo was named after the Indigo dye derived from the plant Indigofera tinctoria and related species. The first recorded use of indigo as a color name in English was in 1289.

This is indigo:

It’s all Isaac Newton’s fault. Isaac Newton introduced indigo as one of the seven colors in his spectrum. In the mid-1660s, when Newton bought a pair of prisms at a fair near Cambridge, the East India Company had begun importing indigo dye into England, supplanting the homegrown woad as the source of blue dye. In a pivotal experiment in the history of optics, the young Newton shone a narrow beam of sunlight through a prism to produce a rainbow-like band of colors on the wall. In describing this optical spectrum, Newton acknowledged that the spectrum had a continuum of colors, but named seven colors: “The originall or primary colours are Red, yellow, Green, Blue, & a violet purple; together with Orange, Indico, & an indefinite varietie of intemediate gradations.”

Indigo is therefore counted as one of the traditional colors of the rainbow, the order of which (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet) is given by the mnemonic Roy G. Biv.

Later scientists have concluded that Newton named the colors differently from current usage. According to Gary Waldman, “A careful reading of Newton’s work indicates that the color he called indigo, we would normally call blue; his blue is then what we would name blue-green or cyan.” The human eye does not readily discriminate among hues in the wavelengths between blue and violet. If this is where Newton meant indigo to lie, most individuals would have difficulty distinguishing indigo from its neighbors. Isaac Asimov said, “It is customary to list indigo as a color lying between blue and violet, but it has never seemed to me that indigo is worth the dignity of being considered a separate color. To my eyes it seems merely deep blue.”

Which brings us to violet.

Here are some shades of violet:

According to surveys in Europe and the United States, violet is the color most commonly associated with the extravagant, the individualist, ambiguity, the unconventional, and the artificial. While violet is the color of humility in the symbolism of the Catholic Church, it has exactly the opposite meaning in general society. A European poll in 2000 showed it was the color most commonly associated with vanity. As a color that rarely exists in nature, and a color which by its nature attracts attention, it is seen as a color of individualism and extravagance. In Chinese painting, the color violet represents the harmony of the universe because it is a combination of red and blue (Yin and yang respectively).

There is much to be found online concerning the difference between violet and purple. Here are some shades of purple (which is not violet):

Here’s my favorite painting with colors in the violet-purple area, April Love (1856), an oil on canvas by the pre-Raphaelite painter Arthur Hughes (1832 - 1915):

The Oxford English Dictionary describes purple as a deep, rich shade between crimson and violet. Wikipedia says the word 'purple' comes from the Old English word purpul which derives from the Latin purpura, in turn from the Greek πορφύρα (porphura), the name of the Tyrian purple dye manufactured in classical antiquity from a mucus secreted by the spiny dye-murex sea snail.

All righty, then.

Is your head swimming yet?

If your head isn’t swimming yet, it will be by the time you finish this article about lavender.

Well, class, that’s enough for one day. More than enough.

Tomorrow (or whenever my next post appears), maybe we’ll talk about black and white. And tan. And grey.

Le cordon bleu

My blogger friend Elizabeth Stanforth-Sharpe published a post the other day entitled “Oxford Blue” that consisted of a single photograph. I was inspired to find out more about (what else?) blue.

The Free Dictionary defines blue as “the hue of that portion of the visible spectrum lying between green and indigo, evoked in the human observer by radiant energy with wavelengths of approximately 420 to 490 nanometers” but the article in Wikipedia begins with “Blue is the colour of the clear sky and the deep sea.”

I was hooked. I kept reading the Wikipedia article.

I found this:

(Wheat- field Under Clouded Sky (July 1890), one of the last works of Vincent Van Gogh)

and this:

(In his Gare Saint-Lazare (1877), Claude Monet used several recently-invented colours including cobalt blue, invented in 1807; cerulean blue, invented in 1860; and French ultramarine, first made in 1828.)

and this:

(In Starry Night Over the Rhone (1888), Van Gogh created a mood or atmosphere with a cobalt blue sky, and cobalt or ultramarine water)

and this:

(Coronation of Louis VIII and Blanche of Castille at Reims in 1223; a miniature from the Grandes Chroniques de France, painted in the 1450s, is kept at the National Library of France.)

and this:

(Photo of seagull against an azure sky by Kiban (2009). Used by permission in accordance with GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2)

and this:

(Figure of a servant from the tomb of King Seth I (1244–1279 BC). Used in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)







and this:

(The Great Wave Off Kanagawa by 19th-century Japanese woodblock artist Hokusai used Prussian blue, a synthetic colour imported from Europe)

and this:

(Dendrobates azureus, the poison dart frog from Brazil)

and this:

(Two horses for Münster, neon sculpture by Stephan Huber (2002). Photograph by Wikipedia user de:Benutzer:AndreKR used by permission under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2)

and even these:

{Photo of blueberries (2006) by Scott Schopieray. Used in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license)

...which are used in the making of:

Oxford blue ice cream!



I found lots of other blue things as well.

Strangely, I was not inspired to find out more about Oxford.

I think it has something to do with these: