However it sound like an interesting exploration of colour so im off to view it and learn from it,I hope.
Cornelissen Art shop in London has a few examples of lapis lazuli in rock form, so beautifully blue it dazzles.The pursuit of this "colour" from Afghanistan was an adventure in itself, forever adding mystery to a place that alone contained it.Was this the origins of the "search for something special that lies hidden", because the icon painters do explore their inner nature as they paint, and the use of blue is like a treasure. Its not just about the painting but the process going on inside the artist.Searching for lapis equates with searching for soul. Lapis is luminous.
Making Colour review – enter a dazzling, eye-opening world
National Gallery, London
This scientific look at how artists risked their lives to create gorgeous colours will blow your mind and open your eyes to art
This scientific look at how artists risked their lives to create gorgeous colours will blow your mind and open your eyes to art
The Beheading of Saint Margaret by Gherardo di Jacopo Starnina (Master of the Bambino Vispo), c1409. Photograph: The National Gallery
When we see, the different wavelengths of light are registered as the "spectrum" of colours first analysed by Isaac Newton in the 17th century in his famous experiment with a prism. All the colours of the rainbow – except it's our minds that convert these lightwaves into what we call colour. When we look at nature, our mind perceives an infinity of colours. One of the basic urges of art through the ages has been to reproduce them – but how?
The first colour was red. It blazed on bodies and covered corpses long before it appeared on the walls of painted caves. About 80,000 years ago, homo sapiens in South Africa used an iron ore known as red ochreto make body art. This led to a fundamental discovery – that the earth's minerals could be used to paint with.
The cave painters who worked in France and Spain in the last ice age had just two colours: red ochre and charcoal black. They took huge risks to use the red ochre – they put it in their mouths, mixed it with spittle and spat it out at walls to create spraypaint outlines of their hands. This was dangerous; iron oxide is toxic.
But that moment of ice age risk was just the start of the crazy lengths artists have gone to since to create colour.
Thirty thousand years after painters were using red ochre and black charcoal at Chauvet Cave, the British artist Roger Hiorns coated a flat in south London with copper sulphate solution to breed spectacular blue crystals on every surface. It was like being in some wondrous mineral cave – but it was a derelict flat on an abandoned estate, and the crystals were the result of an artist's chemical experiment.
Roger Hiorns's blue crystal work Seizure, 2008/2013. Photograph: Gary Calton
Paradoxically, Hiorns's blue crystals – now installed at Yorkshire Sculpture Park – take the quest for colour full circle. Having used minerals from the earth to manufacture colour for thousands of years, art today can use chemistry to synthesise that mineral beauty, to create a cavern of blue in a city.
Roger Hiorns is one of many artists whose experimentations with colour are explored in Making Colour, a dazzling new exhibition at the National Gallery. This scientific look at how artists create colour is truly eye-opening. Everyone who visits it will see art in a new way.
Take impressionism. This show reveals that the first avant garde was made possible by the discovery in the 19th century of new, cheap colours including cobalt blue. Suddenly you could go bonkers with blue. I've delighted so many times in Monet's skies and water, in the ethereal melting of light in his landscapes. Yet this exhibition reveals that his freedom had a technological basis. Squeezing blue from a tube without having to pay a fortune for it meant that Monet could dapple it freely. Without that change, modern art would look totally different. It may not have happened at all.
Blue is incredibly difficult to synthesise. For millennia, the only high-quality, long-lasting blue artists could get their hands on was "ultramarine", made from a rare blue stone called lapis lazuli. The only place lapis lazuli could be obtained was Afghanistan. Europeans got it by trading with the east – that's why they called the colour "ultramarine", or "beyond the sea". It was more precious than gold. In Renaissance paintings it was used most frequently for the blue robes of the Virgin Mary, yet artists also tried wilder experiments with the world's most expensive blue. The exhibition's rarest and most bizarre object is apainting by Orazio Gentileschi from about 1613 of David Contemplating the Head of Goliath, which is actually done on a panel of lapis lazuli that creates a spectacular sky behind David.
Just as cave artists had taken physical chances by putting red ochre in their mouths, Renaissance and baroque artists similarly risked their lives for gorgeous colours. Around 1685, the Dutch painter Rachel Ruysch used a mineral called realgar to obtain pure orange petals for her painting Flowers in a Vase. The mineral is a source of arsenic, so Ruysch was in real danger when she resorted to realgar. Titian and other lovers of colour risked it too.
Long before Hiorns used copper sulphate to make colour, artists got a green called "verdigris" by scraping the oxidation off copper and bronze. The green colour of old bronze statues gave them an art colour.
In James Joyce's novel Ulysses, contemplating the "snotgreen sea", Buck Mulligan jokes that "snotgreen" would make a new "art colour" for Irish artists. By the time Ulysses was written in the early 20th century, such new art colours were all the rage. The 19th century saw a fantastic sunburst, helped along by the development of modern chemistry. The colour mauve was invented. Artists suddenly had access not just to natural greens but totally unnatural, lurid ones. That new universe of green is spangled through Cézanne's landscapes. Meanwhile Degas was losing himself in a universe of reds.
Combing the Hair by Edgar Degas (c1896). Photograph: The National Gallery
If colour seems to free itself from nature and become a means of intense personal expression in late 19th-century art, culminating in the 1900s in the fauve – "wild" – colours of Matisse, this is partly because colour literally escaped the confines of mineral sources like the Silk Road in the industrialised world.
Modern art is more colourful than its predecessors because colour is easier to make. The American painter Frank Stella said he wanted his colours to look as good as they do in the can. Jackson Pollock made use of metallic industrial colours. In the 1960s, the minimalists discovered that colour in art does not have to have anything to do with painting at all. Donald Judd created magical boxes of colour. Dan Flavin filled rooms with a fluorescent glow. At Max's Kansas City in New York he created a hellish red installation to mourn the Vietnam war.
Ultimately, it's all in our minds. The National Gallery show includes a film which experiments on its audience. Look at this bright infrared-like image of a castle in a landscape. Stare at the black dot. Keep staring. Now here is another picture of the castle – what do you see?
I saw a completely natural-looking colour photograph of a castle, with green grass and blue sky – only to be told I was looking at a black-and-white photograph. My mind supplied the colours.
The artist James Turrell plays similar tricks in his installations, which saturate the imagination with mind-boggling colours, and subvert reality.
Colour is freaky. The National Gallery has created a brilliantly lucid journey through its hallucinatory crystal cave where science meets art to open the doors of perception.
• Making Colour is at the National Gallery from 18 June to 7 September
