Methods of Seeing Color and Pattern
The Temperamental Rose: and Other Ways of Seeing Color, Front Cover with pigments and its case
The Temperamental Rose: and Other Ways of Seeing Color
Barbara Hodgson and Claudia Cohen
Vancouver; Heavenly Monkey Edition, 2007
UCSC #30 of 30, N7433.4.H69 T46 2007
The Temperamental Rose: And Other Ways of Seeing Color is an entertaining and informative book meant for readers of all kinds. The book includes an aesthetically appealing variety of charts and diagrams that capture the chronology of color history by demonstrating various ways of presenting or interpreting color in the context of different fields. For example, page 29 shows a silk merchant’s color thread card. In past centuries, color thread cards were mostly used at flea markets in European cities in order to show available designs and colors to potential clients. The representations of color in The Temperamental Rose: And Other Ways of Seeing Color can be used as a resource for understanding past ideologies and beliefs. The way that people have interpreted color throughout history can be seen as analogous to the way that people have seen the world. By demonstrating the history of color, The Temperamental Rose: And Other Ways of Seeing Color explores why people perceive the world they way we do.
This is a Youtube video on, How we see color.
The Temperamental Rose: and Other Ways of Seeing Color, Page 11
Page 11 shows a wheel with different colors of urine. Each color of urine signifies an aspect of a persons’ health.
The Temperamental Rose, Page 37
Page 37 shows different kinds of currency from other countries. This color wheel has been made of real discontinued bills from around the world. Each copy of the book has a different assortment of bills.
The Temperamental Rose, Page 21
This page shows a Euclidean Colour Wheel. Oliver Byrne who was active from the 1830s to the 1870s, sought to clarify mathematics by coloring the lines and shapes of Euclid's geometrical propositions instead of using the traditional lettering system.
This is a Youtube video on, What is color?
Finnegan’s Facebook
Calligraphy and Drawing by Thomas Ingmire
Text selections from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake
San Francisco, CA, 2014
Unique Book
15 x 19 cm, 38 pages
This one-of-a-kind book was acquired by the library on March 12, 2015 and is a welcome addition to our holdings of San Francisco calligrapher Thomas Ingmire. He explains best about how the book came to be: “While visiting the Bancroft Library on the UC Berkeley campus, I came across a manuscript which had a collection of delightful Blackletter capitals that were decorated with amusing drawings of faces. This became the inspiration for the November 2014 Café Chronicles book. The large capitals were initially created in my studio followed by the drawings which were made each morning at Café Puccini. The text passages, selections from Finnegan’s Wake, were added back in the studio. This book is the closest I come to having anything to do with the real world FACEBOOK (thumbs down)."
Comparison:
The Macclesfield Alphabet Book, the Gottingen Model Book, and The Temperamental Rose: And Other Ways of Seeing Color all explore traditional modes of decoration. Today, these books remain valuable and entertaining guides for artists, calligraphers, and art historians. The detailed, page by page accounts of different scripts, decorative motifs, and interpretations of color within these works provide valuable insight into how design has progressed or remained the same since the 15th century. The most recent addition to Special Collections and Archives, Thomas Ingmire’s Finnegan’s Facebook,is one magnificent example of a contemporary iteration of design elements rooted in the middle ages.