In precious opals there might be a dash of red here, a seductive swirl of blue there, and in the center, perhaps, a flirtatious glance of green. But each stone flickers with a unique fire and a good o...
White paint can be made of many things. It can come from chalk or zinc, barium or rice, or from little fossilized sea creatures in limestone graves. The Dutch artist Jan Vermeer even made some of his...
When our eyes see the whole range of visible light together, they read it as white. When some of the wavelengths are missing, they see it as colored.
What they signified was precious, but what they were was not.
The use of natural pigments is similarly embodied in the Orthodox teaching that humanity—like all Creation—was created pure but not perfect, and the purpose of being born is to reach your true potenti...
…in Pliny’s time, it was believed that only the blood of a newly sacrificed kid, or lamb, could shatter a diamond. Pliny wondered—as many did until the seventeenth century when this ‘fact’ was still b...
The best way I’ve found of understanding this is to think not so much of something being a color but of it doing a color.
The Jewish historian Hannah Arendt, in her book about the trial of Nazi administrator Adolf Eichmann, observes that in many cases the Nazi camps were run by ordinary bureaucrats: the evil was astonish...
Sometimes the mind is cruel: it tells us we are worth no more than our possessions, and that without them we would be nothing. And when we believe it, perhaps it is true.
Once upon a time Apache land would have stretched farther than the horizon, through New Mexico almost to Texas, but as white men found gold, silver, turquoise, and copper beneath its surface they carv...
Like pearls that cannot be sprayed too much with perfume or warmed too much with smoke, left alone too much or touched too much, the mother oysters and mussels must be treated gently—as the Scottish p...
Almost every pearl on sale today was born of the planned sexual violation of a small creature, and that considerable suffering hangs on those necklace strings.
In 1879 the Bengali scholar S.M. Tagore compiled a more extensive list of ruby colors from the Purana sacred texts: ‘like the China rose, like blood, like the seeds of the pomegranate, like red lead,...
Years later the Romantic poet John Keats would complain that on that fateful day Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to prismatic colors. But color—like sound and scent—i...
Human life is fragile: we live in the space between one breath and the next. We often try to maintain an illusion of permanence, through what we do, say, wear, buy, and how we enjoy ourselves and who...
Gloria
Emily Kame Kngwarreye
Communists liked history very much. It just had to be the right history. They liked to remember it selectively.
Chauvet Cave: The Discovery of the World’s Oldest Paintings, Jean-Marie Chauvet
But color—like sound and scent—is just an invention of the human mind responding to waves and particles that are moving in particular patterns through the universe—and poets should not thank nature bu...
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