Red: The Art and Science of a Colour

Description

Red grabs your attention. Today we associate red with danger, sex, anger and more, yet the colour was once so significant that things which have a profound impact upon our lives were widely called red, even though they are often not red at all. In this book, Spike Bucklow looks for the reasons why red, of all the colours, has captured the imagination. The first part considers materials that have produced red, from a shaman's burial dressings of 34,000 years ago to today's digital screens. Red could be obtained from animal, vegetable and minerals but there were also the mysterious reds made by medieval alchemists and the high-fashion reds of the nineteenth century that drove the Chemical Revolution. The second part looks at earth, blood and fire, and explores caves and goddesses, holy blood and national flags, metalwork and power grids.

Spike Bucklow is Senior Research Scientist at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge. His other publications include The Alchemy of Paint (2009) and The Riddle of the Image: The Secret Science of Medieval Art (Reaktion, 2014), which won the ACE/Mercers' International Book Award 2015.

Part material history, part cultural inquiry, Bucklow s fine book traces the origins and applications of the reds that have surrounded us since humans first sought to apply the color to their habitats and their bodies. Above all it reminds us that red is never a simple matter. Red is mysterious and it is fugitive: often difficult to make and to make fast, it is equally slippery in the human imagination. From red mists to red herrings by way of red lines and red rags, it is perhaps the most unquiet and unsettling colour of all. --David Batchelor, author of the Luminous and the Grey"