This scientific look at how artists risked their lives to create gorgeous colours will blow your mind and open your eyes to art
The magic of Making Colour in pictures
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 ochre to make body art. This led to a fundamental discovery that the earth's minerals could be used to paint with.
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