COLORS. This article begins with the fact that Welsh is one of a group of languages which does not distinguish between blue and green (called “grue” languages because they conflate blue and green). Is color perception a result of nature or nurture? The article says that current research suggests that it is both nature and nurture. There was a good article by Eric Konigsberg in the New Yorker of January 22, 2007 on the color industry and how color fashions are determined. Unfortunately, I didn’t link it immediately and the New Yorker search engine is the most bizarre search feature I have ever encountered so I can’t provide a link. It points out that the eighties were the height of the gray period while Wasabi green (a “light, yellow-based green”) has been the most popular color of the last five years. Three characteristics of colors are “undertone”, which is a measure of how much yellow or blue it has in it; chroma, which measures the brightness of a color; and value, which measures how light or dark a color is. There are regional patterns in color preferences. An example is Birmingham, Alabama, where “even the sided houses tend to be brown or brick red.” Reading the article, I wonder if preferences in Birmingham were shaped by the dark red, iron-rich soil. There are lots of other good things in the article if you can find it.
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I never heard about “grue” languages! See, this is the kind of thing I wish I had learned in art school. I wonder if the design students were taught the history of colors. This article sounds fascinating. I’ll have to brave the crazy search engine and look around for it.
Regarding regional color preferences: my mother told me that this peculiar shade of blue found on old houses in the deep south was used because the former slaves thought it drove bad spirits away. I recall one more recently built house in Arvonia, Virginia that used this shockingly distinct blue. I love these regional color differences, like the houses on Bell Island or the bright colors in Miami.
And I’ll take 80s gray over that sickening “Wasabi green” any day of the week.
When we painted our house blue, the house in Darien, I thought I’d selected Williamsburg blue with cranberry shutters and white trim. What we got was bright blue with red shutters. It looked like the home of the three bears in a Richard Scarry book. People would say to us, “I like your house. Don’t worry. It will fade.”
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