As I have expanded my artistic career over the past few years, I’ve taken a particular interest in the materials I buy. Wanting to sell quality art made with quality materials, I usually conduct research before restocking paper, paints, canvases, pens and packaging supplies to consider multiple options. I not only want to invest in items that work well for my creative pursuits, but also those that will last well and hopefully do minimal harm to the environment.

But beyond just the quality, I’ve also become more interested in using particular pigments of paint—curious about the chemical reactions that create the different pigments and the story behind their colorful names. Based on my interest in the history of colors themselves, Color—A Natural History of the Palette, written by Victoria Finlay, was a great read for me. Of course, I was initially attracted to the cover which displays vibrant pigments displayed in a way that evokes a romantically exotic origin story. But I also found the content within to also be vibrantly engaging.

Finlay built on her years of experience as a general citizen of the world and a childhood interest in stained glass to spend years hunting down the origin stories of the colors of the rainbow, plus ochre, black, brown and white. Through the histories of various natural pigments and dyes (which are different, by the way) Finlay takes the reader on a fascinating journey of how artists and artisans used traditional techniques to mine, process and manufacture various colors for everyday items like paintings, clothing dye, makeup and wood finishes.

I do think Color is worth the read if you don’t mind rather long rambling detours. This book was somehow too academic to be cozy and too casual to hold real scholastic weight on its own, but would probably be a fun supplementary text to a color theory college course for freshman art majors. On one hand, Finlay seemed to approach the topic with a research-based mindset, and in many cases I appreciated her attention to detail and her commitment to following an intriguing question all the way to its very end (regardless of whether she found any answers). However, I felt that the storytelling was often stilted because of frequent hops across time and around the world. I also thought there were too many hypothetical “short stories” about random and unimportant characters that took away from the colorful facts of history.

This book may be for you if you also like: art; nonfiction; How Its Made (TV series); Winsor & Newton (paint brand); travel; Australia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Italy, United Kingdom, Turkey; China, India, Mexico; natural dying techniques; history; Stradivarius violins; Aboriginal paintings; botany; purple clothing; celadon ceramics; science; J.M.W. Turner; James Abbott McNeill Whistler; Michelangelo; Johannes Van Eyck; frescos; body painting; ancient artifacts; makeup; fashion; museums.

SDG

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