The Wonderful World of Color

Photo: Yale University Press

“No two people, even if they are standing next to each other, ever see exactly the same rainbow, and each eye of each observer actually sees a different one,” David Scott Kastan writes in “On Color” (Yale, 254 pages, $28), a sparkling and erudite meditation on the properties and meanings of the hues that surround us. “And, in fact, the rainbow is constantly being re-formed as the light strikes different water droplets. The rainbow is not an object; it is a vision—a vision dependent upon sunlight, water, geometry, and a sophisticated visual system. Like color itself, even explained, it remains a wonder.”

Written in collaboration with artist Stephen Farthing, “On Color” isn’t aimed at young readers—or at least not at any but the most precocious. For teenagers and adults, though, it offers a rich perspective that will, in the case of parents, undoubtedly inform the way they talk about color when looking at art and illustration with their children. So the book is a win for everyone, and gorgeous to look at, too, with its photographs and reproduced paintings (see a detail from Monet’s “Water Lilies,” right).

Over 10 chapters, each inspired by a different color (along with color’s fellow travelers of black, white and gray), the authors explore the ways that we see color and how our perceptions have varied across time and cultures. Like the world, our language and symbolism are saturated with color. An American turns green with envy; a Hungarian turns yellow. A “blue” movie in English is “green” in Spanish and “pink” in Japanese. Societies have shaken under “green” and “orange” revolutions, and, of course, for much of the 20th century the revolutionary east was “red.” Until the late 16th century, with the introduction into Europe of the citrus fruit, English speakers had no name for the color “orange” (in the 1390s, Chaucer had to describe a fox having color “betwixe yelow and reed”). In the late 19th century, scandal swept the French art world at the Impressionists’ distasteful use of the color violet (“their retinas were diseased,” sniffed a prominent critic). Drawing from art, science and semiotics, with fascinating side trips into politics and history, Messrs. Kastan and Farthing summon a full-spectrum discussion of a phenomenon as wondrous as it is commonplace.

The marvel of color and its varieties comes to young children in two snug little books by Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin. The first, “These Colors Are Bananas” (Phaidon, 28 pages, $16.95), widens the idea of the natural color of natural things. We think of clouds as being white or gray, but they can also be red or gold or blue. Fire, also, burns blue, as well as red and yellow and lemony-green. “Your hand is a color, too,” the authors note on the book’s last page, which has a cutout to allow children to see their own skin as a daub on the human palette.

The second Shopsin and Fulford collaboration, “Find Colors” (Phaidon, 28 pages, $14.95), is a scavenger hunt shaped like a board book. There’s a color-familiar shape cut out of every other page, which children are encouraged to fill by locating a certain color in the world around them. For “find purple,” there’s a void shaped like a bunch of grapes, and “find pink” features three squiggly cutout worm silhouettes. The book encourages children to become color hunters, prowling and pouncing and, we can hope, developing an appreciation for the hues they discover.

Something of the same sort seems at first to be happening in the enigmatic and complicated pages of “The Forest” (Enchanted Lion, 58 pages, $25.95). There’s no color to begin with, just blank creamy paper embossed with the head and shoulders of a baby, with little cutouts for the eyes and nostrils. “It is an enormous, ancient forest that has not yet been fully explored,” Riccardo Bozzi writes (his words translated from the Italian by Debbie Bibo ). On the next page we see tentative green fronds: “In the beginning, the forest is a grove of young pine trees. It is usually free of danger and quite fun to wander through.”

As the pages turn, we alternate between more blank embossed portraits and ever more lush, jungly, colorful paintings, as children explore the forest, paying no attention to time. As the foliage thickens, we see that the figures moving in it are growing up. The faces in the portraits, too, are getting older, and the forest, we come to realize, is life itself. Like Thomas Cole with his four “Voyage of Life” paintings, illustrators Violeta Lopíz and Valerio Vidali are leading us through the cycle of human experience, from our “salad days,” as Shakespeare described them, when we are “green,” through the autumnal shades of old age to, perhaps, a place of renewal beyond.

Writer Minh Lê and illustrator Dan Santat bring us full circle in a different and more immediately sentimental way in “Drawn Together” (Disney Hyperion, 40 pages, $17.99), a picture book aimed at 4- to 8-year-olds that will reverberate with readers who are considerably older. Here, too, vivid color predominates: A glow emanates from the pages as a little boy gets dropped off at his grandfather’s house. From the start, we see a chasm between man and boy that is not so much generational as cultural and linguistic. The boy speaks English, the grandfather speaks Thai, and the two of them appear to have no vocabulary in common. But when the boy retreats to his markers and paper to escape the awkwardness, his grandfather surprises him by picking up pen and ink of his own and “revealing a world beyond words. And in a flash,” the boy tells us, “we see each other for the first time.” In their dynamic drawings—the old man’s in black and white and the boy’s in color—the two find a joyful place of encounter where words are superfluous.


Appeared in the June 2, 2018, print edition as '.'