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+--- Thread: Poetic colour names (/showthread.php?tid=76)
Poetic colour names - Carl Lavoie - 01-21-2023
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I'll put here this borderline off topic post.
I came upon this in an art store today, an oil paint colour labeled 'Caput Mortuum', and was thinking, Adam, that it could be a decent side hustle for you to act as a consultant for an (established? emerging?) pigment/art supply company in creating an 'alchemical' line of colours, the Thrice-Great, or Peacock's Tail series, say. I say that in jest, but I almost bought the colour today on name alone.
One could come up with a few dozen evocative names, I’m sure, just from Ashmole's Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum. Just around the treatises of Ripley are mentions of the 'Blackest Black' as being like a "Cimmerian utter Darkness of compleat Rottenness", which, admittedly, sounds less like an oil paint colour than a black metal concept album; but Lyon Green, Terra Foliata, Toad fully Ruddy, Crow's bill Blue as lead ('Crowys byll bloe as lede'), etc., that could hold unto a small tube label.
And it would be very poetic to walk into a studio (or watch a YouTube video) and hear the artist explain: "How did I made the colour on that section? Easy, you just mix two parts of White Eagles with one part of Splendor Solis."
RE: Poetic colour names - Paul Ferguson - 01-22-2023
Interesting comment here by Professor de Beer:
https://www.oldholland.com/academy/prof-theo-de-beer-about-caput-mortuum-violet-of-dead-head/?cn-reloaded=1
RE: Poetic colour names - Paul Ferguson - 01-22-2023
Both the post and the image remind me of the "Ask if you can have a tin of Striped Paint" April Fool's pranks of my youth.
RE: Poetic colour names - Carl Lavoie - 01-23-2023
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The first two comments by H. de Beer could be plausible origins of the term (the third one is silly) : a) Colcothar/'Golcotha', and b) the pigment from mummies, which was a thing back then:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown
And, Paul, for the colour chips of artist's oils, they usually give them a stroke at one end with a hog bristle brush in order to show their relative transparency/opacity.