My brain needs colour in order to learn

I can't concentrate on dry data - give me stories and flamboyant facts

There are some concepts and topics that just make my brain go smooth. Instead of catching information in its knobbles and whorls*, it’s as if an impossibly hard and shiny comprehension shield has been activated, repelling all boring, difficult invaders. 

I hate to be a STEM-dodging stereotype, but sums that go beyond working out change will usually bounce off the protective coating, reminding me of the ashamed bafflement that was my default setting during maths lessons. Science - a broad church, I do appreciate - was much the same. Biology was mostly OK, because it had leaves and creatures, physics went downhill once we were solving equations rather than working out the velocity of a runaway train and chemistry was a malevolent mystery. 

At art college, there have been two things that turned my brain into an impenetrable fortress. One was geometry, which pretends to be drawing but is really maths, and the other was colour theory. As soon as a prism comes out, and someone starts talking about the cones and rods in our eyes, the shield doors close. I have grasped that the primary colours I was taught at, appropriately, primary school (red, blue and yellow) aren’t the only ones. The alternative options are cyan, magenta and yellow. I can get my head around the former being “painters’ primaries” and the later “printers’ primaries”, but as soon as someone in charge starts talking about them as additive colours and subtractive colours, I zone out.

Cyan, magenta and yellow, which are *checks notes yet again* subtractive colours.

But recently I picked up a copy of Kassia St Clair’s book The Secret Lives of Colour. The edges of its pages are coloured with the hue being described and it’s so beautifully presented that I’m tempted to eat it. (If you are interested in textiles, I implore you to read her book The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History. It’s smashing.) In the manner of a child being forced to eat the boring stuff before they’re allowed near any cake, I had to sit through the - mercifully short - science bit at the beginning to get to the fascinating stories of how certain colours came to be.

The Secret Lives of Colour is a delight: fascinating, playful and thought-provoking. My guilty pleasure is the stories with a Horrible Histories vibe, such as how the introduction of copper arsenite pigments in the 19th-century was “responsible for many deaths, as unsuspecting consumers papered their homes, clothed their offspring and wrapped their baked good in an exciting new shade that contained lethal doses of arsenic.” How about some Mummy, a rich brown made from the long-dead remains of ancient Egyptians, ground up and sold by apothecaries as a pigment? “There was some debate,” St Clair writes, “as to which bits of the mummy to use to get the best and richest browns. Some suggested just using the muscle and flesh, while others thought that the bones and bandages should also be ground up to to get the best out of this ‘charming pigment’.” There’s Indian yellow, which appeared in Europe in the 1700s with its “distinctive tell-tale reek of ammonia.” Why so stinky? Because, according to some sources, it was made from the urine of cows fed solely on mango leaves.  

I knew that lead white was a very bad business for its makers and consumers, and that as a cosmetic it was effective in both masking the complexion and shortening the life of its fans, but it was only through reading a description of how it was made that I could understand the chemistry of this particular colour. “Strips of lead were placed in a compartment inside a specially designed clay pot that was divided in two. Vinegar was poured into the other half, then the pots were surrounded by animal dung and placed inside a shed with a tightly fitting door for 30 days. During that time, a relatively simple chemical reaction would take place. Fumes from the vinegar reacted with the lead to form lead acetate; as the dung fermented, it let off CO2, which, in turn reacted with the acetate, turning it into carbonate. After a month some poor soul was sent into the stench to fetch the pieces of lead, by now covered in a puff-pastry-like layer of white lead carbonate, which was ready to be powdered, formed into patties and sold.”

Crayon-fondling in Hobby Craft recently

Reading this I realised something about how I learn, or to put it another way, the way my brain can be coaxed into engaging with things. Along with gleaming colour I need anecdotes, descriptive language and narrative. Tell me a story and give me some characters to care about. I need words rather than numbers, examples rather than concepts. The Crayola colours that I remember from childhood were the ones with unusual names - raw umber, burnt sienna, chartreuse, sepia, thistle, cadet blue, carnation pink - that made me think. Why was sienna burnt? Who was being given carnations? What on earth is a chartreuse? A new box of crayons was a treasure chest. The smell, the colours, the neatness of serried wax cylinders waiting to be transformed into anything I drew and those mysterious names were a huge part of it. (If you’d like to lose some time to the internet, I recommend taking a look at Crayola’s Wikipedia page and for more pigment chat, the artist Evie Hatch is brilliant at bringing to life the colours of the past on Instagram, often in collaboration with Jackson’s Art Supplies. Check out her colour analysis of brat green, below.)

jacksons_art

A post shared by @jacksons_art

 Makeup brands have long known this - Revlon’s classic lip and nail shades Fire and Ice and Cherries in the Snow conjure up such strong images that I want to go and order them right now. Urban Decay’s brilliantly surly 1990s naming conventions were a spark of grunge genius. Bruise, Roach, Smog, Plague, UV-B, Pallor, Asphyxia, Oil Slick and Frostbite were all lipsticks that sounded as unpleasant as possible. It makes me wish that the original makers of lead white had been more creative and/or honest with its name: Dead White, maybe, or Agony and Ivory. 

This summer I’m assisting a ceramic artist (the wonderful Charlie Russell) and I’ve been going through her glazes, which are legion. I find glazes to be very mercurial - you never know what you’re going to get when you take the lid off let alone when you see what alchemy has taken place in the kiln. It always blows my mind when the name on the pot is wildly different to the muddy liquid inside, or when a glaze or underglaze is called something like Kaleidoscope or Yonder. Even colour-adjacent names are hard to pin down - OK, so this is Lagoon. But is that a lagoon on a cloudy day in winter or a spring morning? My favourite name so far is Monet’s Pond (which, the internet tells me, is a translucent, bright blue base glaze with red, green, and yellow crystals). It’s slightly pretentious but evocative. I love it for that, and I can’t imagine I’ll ever forget it.

Ultimately, that’s what learning is, isn’t it? Being given information in the hope that you’ll remember it and use it. For me, a chart showing the wavelengths and energy of visible light doesn’t have a hope in hell of penetrating my brain. But the image of an ancient pigment-maker bravely wading into a dung hut to harvest a deadly shade is now baked in. I’m learning that I need lessons that are colourful to keep my grey matter in play. So next on the timetable, as I get my head round the basics of clay through doing rather than reading, is going to be actually glazing something with Monet’s Pond. I can’t wait to dive in.

*I know that this isn’t how cognition actually works even if I am a bit hazy on the finer detail.