A history of colour in the home - part 1

A History of Colour in the Home - Part 1

When learning about the language of colour, it's helpful to understand the grammar - the fundamental set of pigments that still to this day dictate and steer our experience of colour and the way we use it.

The Language and Grammar of Paint

Colour is fundamentally a language, so it's important to first understand the grammar to be able to build your own vocabulary.

When I talk about grammar, I am talking about a set of pigments that have defined our experience of colour since the Palaeolithic age 30,000 years ago. The pigments we use today are still in essence the same as they were all those years ago, so it's crucial to understand their history to work with colour in a meaningful way in the modern day.

Earth pigments such as red ochre and yellow ochre would have been harvested from the ground. These could also be processed to achieve deeper tones of burnt umber and burnt sienna. Mineral pigments such as Lapis Lazuli were discovered and mined from rocks in the Ancient Civilizations period.

Heavy metals were also the basis for some pigments, and perhaps the most well known of these is lead white. Others include cinnabar red and uranium yellow. However, towards the end of the 18th century, it became clear that the extraction process for these pigments was producing toxic fumes. Titanium dioxide eventually came to replace lead white, and is used widely today.

While the cave dweller would have been using soot and burnt wood to achieve a carbon black pigment, we now use a mineral carbon instead.