Every Self-Portrait Is a Clown Painting

Posted: 15 April 2021

Imported from substack so the formatting is messed up, it looks better on substack.

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I need to know for 2016 clown sightings.

Is it "...a person dressed as a clown..." or "...a clown..."?

I mean, once someone dresses like a clown, can then be described as a clown?

- Anna Frodesiak, Wikipedia Talk page for “Clown”

This issue of Alphabetology is not about clowns.

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Art

La Bodega Art Connections

21st Century Colors

21st Century Colors Part 2: Anish Kapoor Do Not Read This

Chemistry

Mrs. Meyer’s Hand Soap Secret

Art

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La Bodega Art Connections

Here are a few people I met through the now defunct La Bodega Gallery, who do work that inspires me (more Brooklyn artists incoming next week as well):

Bogart Szabo (a fellow Andre!) is a local artist I met when he dropped some work off at La Bodega for a show. I follow him on Instagram and think his found object work is unbelievably good. The pieces have really beautiful rhythm and composition, they build an incredible depth through repetition, they’re familiar and inviting. They’re sculptures that look like paintings. I can’t get over them!

Another artist I met at La Bodega, this one through figure drawing sessions I would attend there, is David Samuel Stern. He weaves multiple portraits together into one on vellum, creating work that looks haunting and alive, that breathes, that moves around within a frame as if possessed. The figure dances around and seems blurry but presents us with something more real than a single still image ever could.

And last (for this issue) but not least, the former proprietor of La Bodega, Miguel Ayuso. He created an inclusive and inviting environment, and always encouraged people to create art and to have fun with it. Seeing his process and the fun he has making his own art, his creativity and constant exploration, and how his work connects him with people around him is inspirational. I hope to be able to do the same with my paintings.

21st Century Colors

Last week I wrote about Cadmium Red and the gigantic splash it made as soon as artists began using it. This week I’m going to talk about color names and how manufacturers get wild with which pigments constitute which color.

Here’s a quick jumping-off point: toxic colors. Lead compounds create really bright, opaque pigments with great lasting power, so they were used everywhere before people realized that they poison and kill you. [1] This creates some problems; you can imagine using a color for years and now realizing you’ll get sick if you keep using it, but not having any exact replacements. You can use different colors but, in the immortal words of people who can’t give a satisfactory excuse for their complaints: they’re not the same. [2]

For this (poison) and other reasons, manufacturers have switched to alternative pigments. This makes sense for things like replacing lead, but they also sometimes do this for colors just because the original pigments are hard to find or troublesome to work with. Ultramarine blue was originally made from the precious stone lapis lazuli, but is now made of synthetic pigment and keeps the same name. Sometimes the new colors have different names: naples yellow made without lead is usually called “Naples yellow hue” and is a mix of other colors. Some people still make lead-based naples yellow, for the real lead-head afficionados, sold as “Naples yellow genuine.” But the two colors are not the same! It’s like something being called a cheese vs. a cheese product.

There are also no hard restrictions about what you name a paint color. Some manufacturers just call colors whatever they want. Pigments always vary in color between manufacturers, sometimes wildly. You wind up having to do a bunch of research to find out what color exactly you’re getting.

I mentioned carmine last week, the color made out of crushed up cochineal insects. There are no manufacturers creating “real” carmine today. You can check standardized pigment names matched up to color names [here], with carmine being NR12. There’s a list of color names but none of those are made anymore. You won’t find them online. It’s not entirely up to date, either: [burnt carmine] by Rembrandt, for example, is not NR12. There’s [this] “carmine” which doesn’t even tell you what it’s made of, but I will bet you one million billion dollars that it’s not made out of bugs.

Most manufacturers just change the color name a little and make something slightly different. Here’s [Permanent Carmine] by Windsor and Newton, originally made of crushed kermes insects (rather than the cochineal of carmine), and now made of quinacridone, a synthetic compound. Here’s [Carmine Deep], made with naphthol, another synethic compound. Neither of these have bugs but they both borrow the “Carmine” name. Color manufacturing is a complete free-for-all.

Part 2 - Anish Kapoor Do Not Read This

Color manufacturing is a complete free-for-all, unless you happen to own a patent for the production of a color. I think the most famous person who has exclusive access to (what is arguably) a color is Anish Kapoor with Vantablack. I was going to write more about this but found this article that covers basically everything that I would have been interested in writing about:

[link]

It’s a really good article! It mentions that the Blue Man Group has tried to recreate Yves Klein’s “Internation Klein Blue,” which I think is incredibly funny. The Blue Man Group wish they could have his blue, but they can’t. They will never have Yves Klein’s blue.

But a really brief rundown of the Vantablack drama, if you don’t want to read the above: There’s this guy, Anish Kapoor, who won a bid with a company called Surrey Nanosystems to be allowed to use their facilities to create artworks using Vantablack. Vantablack is NOT a paint or a pigment, it is a “material” made out of very dense nanotubes which are sprayed/grown on a surface and capture something like 99.6% of visible light. [3] The bid he won was for an auction set up by Surrey Nanosystems, who wanted to invite one artist to use their specialized facilities to spray Vantablack onto art.

A guy named Stuart Semple saw this and started a giant stink, writing that it is “not fair” that Kapoor has exclusive access to Vantablack and releasing a bunch of products that explicitly bar Kapoor from purchasing them:

I’m going to avoid the larger questions of whether patents are capital g Good and what’s the deal with property rights in general because a) they are tremendous questions and b) Semple is not making the case that intellectual property as a concept is fradulent, he is saying that colors should be available to everyone and that Kapoor is a villain for having exclusive access to Vantablack. [4]

Semple seems like he is intentionally misrepresenting what ownership of Vantablack means and Kapoor’s role in this whole thing in order to ride a wave of social media popularity and sell his various paints. Faux outrage to sell products! What grace, what nobility. Because looking at the facts for like, five seconds, you can see that:

1. Vantablack is not a pigment, it is a material that can only be “grown” in a laboratory environment.

2. Surrey Nanosystems, the inventors of Vantablack, are the ones who actually own the rights to whatever process they use for creating Vantablack.

3. They designed and auctioned off an agreement to work with just one artist on this, claiming that they do not have the bandwidth to work with more than one artist.

So to start off, Vantablack is not a color, and it’s not paint. It’s a material grown in a lab. But this is maybe getting too semantic, so I’ll ignore this.

Anish Kapoor isn’t doing anything to limit Vantablack or to keep other people from using it. The real blame lies with the eggheads at Surrey Nanosystems. They’re the ones who decided that only one artist would be allowed to use their invention, and that that person would have exclusive access to it. Even if Vantablack wasn’t exclusive to Kapoor, it’d still be exclusive to Surrey.

But even if they DIDN’T patent their process, is it really realistic to think that anybody out there could independently recreate the same process used by a research lab whose first customers are in the “defence and space” sectors? This seems so absurd to me. It’s like getting mad that CERN won’t let any random person use their Hadron Collider.

Maybe in an ideal world Surrey would have some sort of queue system for artists to be able to coat their work in Vantablack at their facility that “only has bandwidth for one artist.” But Surrey decided that they want their invention to be exlusively available to one person. And that person happens to be Anish Kapoor. To give him credit, Semple has made his own very black black paints as a result of this, and they are available to everyone (except Anish Kapoor). But all the outrage around Kapoor just looks like a blatant (successful! but blatant) marketing scheme.

Chemistry

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Mrs. Meyer’s Hand Soap Secret

Here is some hard hitting investigative journalism:

You can ignore the numbers, it was an idea I had that I have abandoned. It looked like this:

Exhibit 1: Limited Edition Soap

After writing that out I realized it didn’t make any sense to organize my investigation this way. Moving on.

The limited edition soap bottle uses 5% more plastic than the regular edition soap bottle (less pump). [4] They contain the same amount of soap. Where does the 5% improvement come from? The bottle on the right is visibly slightly shorter, and I guess probably a little thinner too. I’m not going to include a visual of this, you’ll just have to take my word for it, or email Mrs. Myers and ask yourself. Anyway, I think a slightly smaller bottle with imperceptibly thinner walls makes sense for a 5% plastic reduction.

My point here is: If you are interested in reducing your Mrs. Myers hand soap plastic recycling footprint by 5%, you should make sure NOT to buy the seasonal soaps, or at the very least, check and make sure they have the (less pump) 30% text on them.

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[1] Some people believe that van Gogh had lead poisoning, leading to, aside from health problems, him seeing halos of light around objects. This might have inspired his painting, The Starry Night. Van Gogh’s health is notable enough to have it’s own [Wikipedia article].

[2] To be honest, specific chromatic differences between manufacturers probably don’t matter that much, especially for more “standard” colors. Most of the time, you use alizarin crimson because you want a deep red that’s a little blue-ish. It doesn’t usually matter that the chromatic values vary a little. So as long as you get the paint with the same name, it’s probably going to do the trick. Especially since you’re going to be mixing it most of the time. It might matter more if you’re using the color straight from the tube, or if you have a very specific color in mind which you can’t get it with a different brand. Pigment concentrations make at least as much of a difference in how the colors look, and they aren’t listed anywhere by anyone.

[3] I heard from a friend that some of these materials that absorb absurd amounts of visible light are fire hazards. They absorb so much light that they get really really hot and just burst into flames. Very cool.

[4] And just in case you think he might not, I assure you, Semple absolutely supports intellectual property rights. The composition of his own hyper-matte black paints is top secret and something that Semple and team are “not disclosing.” [source]

[5] (Less pump) is what originally caught my attention because if you say “Bottle (less pump)” out loud, people will think you are a cuckoo bird.

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That’s it this week, nothing about music because I just listened to house music playlists all week. A lot of them are really bad!!!!!!!

Coming next issue, because I had a busy week and not enough time to write this: Hand Telescopes and Pinhole Glasses.

Thanks for reading, tell your friends, have a great day.