Week 11 Inspiration

I first heard about gamboge on Radiolab, my long-time beloved science podcast, of which I am a very loyal listener.  One of my favourite episodes is the one about Color, not surprisingly, and one of the stories they told was the story of Gamboge.

You can listen to the full episode here
It's super interesting, but it's also an hour long.  The story about gamboge starts at around thirty-five minutes in and is about ten minutes long.  
There's also a shorter version of this episode that narrows it down to just the gamboge story and one other (of course the other story - about colour blind monkeys - is first; you still need to fastforward to about 16 minutes in) here

I've pulled a section of the transcript that I based the painting on, and I want to narrow it down to a shorter quote to actually display with the painting as part of its presentation  (Actually I wrote the first paragraph myself, sort of a paraphrase of the story up until this point; the rest of it is the direct transcript):

A batch of gamboge resin is harvested by tapping a camboge tree, attaching a bamboo tube, and leaving it there for two years while the resin flows, pools into the tube, and hardens.  It’s a slow, relatively boring process.  The area where these trees grow, however, is not always so peaceful.  Some tubes of gamboge resin come back to the paint factories riddled with bullets.

Some pigments come straight out of hills that are right in the middle of warzones.  Colours are sometimes soaked in blood.

Imagine the first person to ever find this brilliant yellow, maybe 10,000 years ago.  He’s walking through the forest after it’s rained, and he sees it there, on a tree, and he’s amazed.  So he puts his finger into the yellow, and then dabs some on his face, and he feels instantly beautiful, like larger than himself.

“It is about being related to something transcendent.“

And that, says George, is the other side of the coin.

“To an upper high, or whatever.  Therefore you probably used it for all sorts of ceremonies.

Marriages, feasts, maybe war paint, to feel invincible.  Any moment, he suspects, that needed to be pulled out of the ordinary, and lifted up.

“And therefore you need something that is bright, something that is beautiful, and special.  And this yellow gives you something special.  It is a perfect yellow.”

Also in this part of the episode is a conversation with Victoria Finlay,  who authored a book called Color: A Natural History of the Palette.  I think the gamboge story is in her book because she was talking about it on the show.  I ordered this book yesterday, and I should receive it tomorrow. I'm pretty excited to read about gamboge as well as many other natural pigments, and maybe these other stories will inspire more art.

I also ordered a similar book called Colors, which I think is the book one of our guests at the last critique was telling me I would enjoy.  I plan on reading Finlay's book first.  I expect both books will have similar content, but this is a subject I'm pretty interested in researching extensively.

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Although it was probably totally subconscious, I think seeing and collecting this image earlier in the week influenced my colour palette this week.  I'm not sure if I liked the image because the colours were similar to what I was already using, or if the colours I'm using have something to do with being otherwise drawn to the image.

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I actually collected this image after getting half way through with the latest princess embroidery piece, but this was more or less the style she was meant to emulate.  I didn't want to directly portray traditional Indian dress.  I say that she is Indian, but really, I didn't want her to specifically belong to any one culture, just a cultural mood.