10 Quotes by Victoria Finlay

If Bacchus ever had a color he could claim for his own, it should surely be the shade of tannin on drunken lips, of John Keat's 'purple-stained mouth', or perhaps even of Homer's dangerously wine-dark sea.

I realized it was like a dating agency: the ions are the lost souls looking for mates; the electrolyte is the agency that can help them find each other.

...almost every pearl on sale today was born of the planned sexual violation of a small creature, and that considerable suffering hangs on those necklace strings.

Years later the Romantic poet John Keats would complain that on that fateful day Newton had “destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to prismatic colors.” But color – like sound and scent – is just an invention of the human mind responding to waves and particles that are moving in particular patterns through the universe – and poets should not thank nature but themselves for the beauty and the rainbows they see around them.

White paint can be made of many things. It can come from chalk or zinc, barium or rice, or from little fossilized sea creatures in limestone graves. The Dutch artist Jan Vermeer even made some of his luminescent whites with a recipe that included alabaster and quartz – in lumps that took the light reflected into the painting and made it dance.3.

The use of natural pigments is similarly embodied in the Orthodox teaching that humanity – like all Creation – was created pure but not perfect, and the purpose of being born is to reach your true potential.

When our eyes see the whole range of visible light together, they read it as “white.” When some of the wavelengths are missing, they see it as “colored.

The best way I’ve found of understanding this is to think not so much of something “being” a color but of it “doing” a color.

But color – like sound and scent – is just an invention of the human mind responding to waves and particles that are moving in particular patterns through the universe – and poets should not thank nature but themselves for the beauty and the rainbows they see around them. While.