Art is by Bev Jackson Cotter

Bev Jackson Cotter is a member of the Albert Lea Art Center, 226 W. Clark St. in Albert Lea.

Last month I said I would not do another column on color, but I’ve received so many comments on the November article, that I decided to give it another go-round.

Several years ago, I was visiting with a lady who had just finished a watercolor painting of a cabin nestled amongst pine trees. She couldn’t figure out just why it didn’t look the way she wanted it to. It was her first attempt at watercolor and she was working on her own with no lessons to help her understand composition, depth, color or any of the problems involved in any special art work. I was impressed with the painting she had done, but she wanted help with the trees. They were green, one single color of green. It was only the saturation of paint on the brush at any given moment that gave the trees any depth.

Years ago, when I was taking classes at Austin Community College, my art instructors commented on our work, “I really like the way you ____, and I would suggest that you _____.”

The teachers provided such a positive environment that you wanted to keep going and improving. I tried this same approach on the lady with the cabin and trees painting, and we had a fun conversation about the emotional rewards of doing art. We don’t need to be expert or famous or even very good at it. It’s fun to do and soul satisfying.

Have you ever really looked at a pine tree? There must be dozens of greens in a single branch.

Consequently, painting a tree requires a lot of experimenting with mixtures of color pigments, including maybe a touch of red or yellow to accent an area.

Color is fun. The book I mentioned last month, “The Secret Lives of Color” by Kassia St. Clair gives us an interesting insight into various colors and their effect on our lives.

For example, Scheele’s green, which is paint the color of peas, was discovered accidentally in 1775 by a Swedish scientist who was studying the element arsenic. Because of the lack of green pigments available at that time, he recognized its commercial potential and eventually it was used in fabrics, wallpaper, paper, as an artist’s pigment and for tinting candy.

It was such a popular color that by 1858, it was estimated that there were 100 square miles of wallpaper dyed with copper arsenite greens in British homes, hotels, hospitals and railway waiting rooms.

During these years, a number of deaths occurred that raised questions. All of the people suffered the same symptoms: nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and rashes, including a 19-year -old who made artificial flowers, a little girl who sucked the green powder from a bunch of artificial grapes, and a mass poisoning that occurred when a package of white arsenic was mistaken for powdered sugar and added to a batch of peppermints.

In 1815, the British decreed that Napoleon, following his defeat at Waterloo, should be sent to St. Helena, a small, remote island in the mid-Atlantic. The walls of his room were papered with a design in Scheele’s green. He died there six years later. His physician suspected stomach cancer; however, when his body was exhumed in 1840, it was very well preserved, a symptom of arsenic poisoning. A sample of his hair, tested in the 20th century was found to have high levels of arsenic.

Surprisingly, the use of Scheele’s green was not prohibited, but its use was limited to much smaller amounts, and according to the book, in 1870 the head of the Zuber & Cie factory in Mulhouse, France, stated, “the pigment, so beautiful and so brilliant” was now limited “to prohibit all trace of arsenic in papers is to go too far and would hurt business unjustly and needlessly.” It was many years later when the use of regulations and warning symbols became necessary.

It’s interesting, that in this beautiful season of Christmas trees, wreaths, roping, swags and a multitude of other green decorations, we go along merrily on our way, with no idea of just where and how the colors we use came to be and how they affect our lives.

Merry Christmas, everybody!