Beyond the Rainbow with the Mantis Shrimp

Imagine distinguishing a dozen primary colors, seeing ultraviolet and infrared, and perceiving six different types of polarized light. For the giant Mantis shrimp of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the world is colorful beyond human imagination. Reuters reports a new study by Swiss and Australian marine biologists, suggesting that Mantis shrimps need to detect minute changes in color and polarization to detect nearly invisible prey in murky seawater. They probably also use color to send sexual signals during mating. The scientific report is available online at the Public Library of Science Journal.

by CybersamX.

The typical mantis shrimp has emerald green eyes and a pale green or orange body, with bright yellow outlines.

FUN FACTS:

• Mantis shrimp have the fastest kick in the animal kingdom: 75 feet per second. They can punch a hole through aquarium glass.
• Mantis shrimp are named for their resemblance to the praying mantis insect.
• Their coloration varies to match their habitats. The golden mantis is green when it dwells in sea grasses but tan in sandy areas. The crevice-dwelling rock mantis varies from dark green to black.
• Mantis shrimp tend to be active hunters at night.

by sandstep

Here are some color palettes inspired by the Mantis shrimps:

by Jelantique

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]

by KPhilly40

The sheep coughed in the rough, sere grass of the park, where frost lay bluish in the sockets of the tufts. Across the park ran a path to the wood- gate, a fine ribbon of pink.
—D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, 1928.

by BerylM

Toward the end of the afternoon, a mauve mist veils the avenues so that you do not know where they end, and the unexpected discovery of a wild hyacinth, with its three slender bells of artless blue swaying in the wind, has all the charm of a stolen joy.
—Collette, The Vagabond; translated by Enid McLeod, 1955.

Evil is not a primary color. That is the point of the Wachowski brothers' video- arcade treatment of "Speed Racer," insofar as one can be determined. Blue, you can trust. Red and yellow, black and white — they're all decent visible wavelengths. It's purple you have to watch out for.

—Jim Emerson, a review of "Speed Racer"

by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³

Where the blue of the night / Meets the gold of the day, / Someone waits for me.
—Bing Crosby, Roy Turk & Fred Ahlert, "Where the Blue of the Night," 1931.

Loïe Fuller, Illusionist of Light and Color

One of the most spellbinding color illusionists of the last century left her spectators dazzled to near-mystical proportions. Loïe Fuller (1862-1928) was pioneer of choreography and an innovator of theatrical lighting, holding patents for creating color gels and using chemical salts for luminescence. When she took to the stage dressed in flowing silk costumes specially lit according to her own schemes, she transformed into a full-fledged magician. When modern dance founder Isadora Duncan first witnessed Fuller's shape-shifting wizardry, she was bewitched by an alchemy of color and movement that left the impression of a once-in-a-lifetime miracle. Employing only voluminous colored silks illuminated by beams of light, Fuller performed what amounted to a shamanic ritual, convincing her spectators that a sacred metamorphosis was unfolding. Fuller evoked the primal power of the bonfire, depicted the wonder of new life, and enacted the elevation of the soul into boundless essence. Though the experience left Duncan in a state of wordless awe, she couldn't help attempting to account for the sheer magnitude of what she beheld:

"Before our very eyes she turned to many-coloured, shiny orchids, to a wavering, flowering sea-flower, and at length to a spiral-like lily, all the magic of Merlin, the sorcery of light, colour, flowing form. What an extraordinary genius! No imitator of Loïe Fuller has ever been able even to hint at her genius! I was entranced, but I realized that this was a sudden ebullition of nature which could never be repeated. She transformed herself into a thousand colourful images before the eyes of her audience. Unbelievable. Not to be repeated or described. Loïe Fuller originated all the changing colours and floating Liberty scarves. She was one of the first original inspirations of light and changing colour. I returned to the hotel dazzled and carried away by this marvelous artist. . . . I was more and more enthusiastic about her marvellous ephemeral art. That wonderful creature—she became fluid; she became light; she became every colour and flame, and finally she resolved into miraculous spirals of flames wafted toward the Infinite." (My Life, pp. 71-72)

The significance of Loïe Fuller's performance can hardly be exaggerated. She embodied the Goddess of Light and the Rainbow, whether under the guise of the Greek Artemis or Iris, the Hindu Uma, the Mayan Ix Chel, the Celtic Brigid, or the Roman Diana. Biographers Richard and Marcia Current called Fuller a "magician of light." Befitting a goddess, Fuller had a paradoxical nature, and she created her own mythology. Her biographers explain:

"A tall and lovely sylph in posters and sculptures, she was in reality a rather chubby woman with a fairly plain face. A dance innovator, she possessed no formal training in choreography. Eventually a cofounder of art museums, she had never even seen an art exhibit before going to Paris at the age of thirty. A close and respected associate of some of the most learned men and women in the world, she could claim no institutional education beyond that offered by the common schools of Illinois in the 1860s and 1870s. What she did have, in addition to her winning ways, was a dauntless will to get ahead, together with enough intelligence, resourcefulness, and ingenuity to give effect to that will. . . . She rose to extraordinary heights from a quite modest background. Her accomplishments were such that she might well have been satisfied with an unadorned account of her beginnings. She was not. Once she had achieved celebrity, she knocked several years off her age and made up fantastic tales about what was left of her early years. She created her own myth." (Loïe Fuller: Goddess of Light, 1997.)

What can we learn from Fuller's color magic?

• Physicality is a limitation only if we allow it to be. Fuller used her earth-mother physique to communicate a sylph-like spirit of the air. Her secrets? Natural, freeform movement and the power of intention.
• Personal history is a limitation only if we allow it to be. One is only as interesting as one makes oneself, so Fuller invented her own legend. Her secret? Reframing the truth to reveal the fascination.
• Formal training is less important than resourcefulness and ingenuity. Fuller's secrets? Banishing doubts and asking "What if?"
• A single silk and a beam of light can unfold a miracle. Fuller created something from nothing. Her secrets? Focusing on simplicity and following her inner guidance.

Before succumbing to breast cancer in 1928, Fuller found herself immortalized on canvas by Toulouse-Lautrec, in verse by Yeats, and on film by Lumiére. Not bad for a girl from a Chicago suburb who marched to her own drummer and followed her own spotlight.

by ONE/MILLION

The large bulbous nose, the greenish- gray hair and lashes, the gray- white eyes, all had the deathly color of leather buried for centuries in Davy Jones’s locker, and the neatly folled cloth bundle under his arm seemed a mariners’s kit.
—Dawn Powell, The Golden Spur, 1962.

The Girl with the Multicolored Hair

Text by Jeff at Omegaword, palettes by COLOURlovers

The last time I saw the girl with the multicolored hair, she was following sunbeams through the kitchen door and ran, laughing, out into the world to find another bright friend. The last time I saw the girl with the multicolored hair, she flew above the treetops where the wind blows warm, and clouds were not allowed to interfere with such a perfect sky. The last time I saw the girl with the multicolored hair, she sang to the sparrows and the green, green grass, and rain was always welcome, but only after noon.

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]

by gomattolson

With his red and blue pencil the blue- eyed, red- faced official made little crosses here and there on the papers, showing Krug where to sign.
—Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister, 1947.

by jbrownell

Violet hills and burnt umber buttes rested in their still American places like novels on Zane Grey’s bookshelf.
—Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, 1977.

Seeing Colors Through Rose-Tinted Glasses

Thine is the heritage of the world, thine the task of moulding destinies, thine the privilege of seeing all things through rose-coloured glasses.
—Charles W. Wood, The Argosy

"To see the world through rose-colored glasses" is an idiom referring to a positive outlook colored by naivety or sentimentality. As feminist commentator Pamela Varkony puts it, "Looking at the world through rose colored glasses makes for a pretty picture, but not an accurate one." To be sure, one famous drawback of rose-colored glasses is that not everything that appears red is objectively red. Hence, the lovelorn are cautioned against wearing them: "When we are in love, or when we want to be in love, we sometimes see the world through rose-colored glasses and don't spot the red flags" (Christine Hassler, 20 Something, 20 Everything, p. 224). Sightseers are also advised against wearing rose-colored glasses while on holiday: in Alaska, you'll miss seeing the Northern Lights; in Australia, Mount Uluru will be invisible; in Bermuda, you could sunburn and not know it; in Switzerland, the Matterhorn will appear bright pink. Rose-colored glasses are likely rarely abused at the Grand Canyon, where at close of day the sky turns purple, the sun glows orange, and the clouds blush pink.

Whimsy aside, although the exact origin of the idiom has been lost in the "rose-coloured mist" of time (Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, 1856), we can speculate that it may reference the sanguine light of sunset, when the world is momentarily bathed in rosy radiance. That healthy glow is soon followed by twilight blindness and then impenetrable darkness—hence the air of suspicion. Ironically, though, private investigators and varmint hunters assure us that red lenses help the eyes adjust to low lighting and improve one's night vision. That's because red lenses filter out lower wavelengths and reveal a brighter panorama. So the poetic caution against rose-colored glasses would appear to be ill-conceived.

by Malingering.

Indeed, Dr. John Izzo suggests that figurative rose-colored glasses can be a practical tool enabling starry-eyed romantics to pinpoint their ideals and pursue them with focus. He explains: "Usually meant as an insult, [seeing the world through rose-colored glasses] is a way of saying that someone is a bit too innocent, that he or she sees the world with too much optimism. The intimation is straightforward: Wake up and smell the coffee. Some people see the world through other kinds of glasses—cynical glasses—and surely the lenses they choose color their experiences. When it comes to rediscovering wonder and innocence . . . few decisions are more critical than choosing your glasses" (Second Innocence: Rediscovering Joy and Wonder, p. 73). Dr. Izzo seems to be suggesting that in the absence of adopting some sort of rosy focal point, one is likely to see a world limited to depressing shades of grey. It's true that "the particular glasses we wear reflect how we analyze and interpret what we see" (John Peter Rothe, Undertaking Qualitative Research, p. 137), just as the microscopic lens unlocks a richness of detail. These glasses symbolize what Prof. Jerry Griswold calls "forcible shifts in perspective, techniques for seeing things differently." Prof. Griswold cites The Wizard of Oz, "in which Dorothy and her companions put on green glasses before entering Emerald City, and then marvel at how green everything looks. In Pollyanna, however, the equivalent image is, significantly, not rose-colored glasses, but the prism. When the girl hangs dozens of these in the windows of Mr. Pendleton's house, we see something more than her transformation of his gloomy room into a rainbow-spangled place. We see how she has changed him in her prismatic shifts of perspectives. It is her pointing to a spectrum of possibilities, her reminding him of his freedom to choose, which leads Mr. Pendleton to conclude that Pollyanna is 'the very prism of all'" (Audacious Kids, p. 235).

In her book Scraps of Life, the poet Carol Loy Miller offers an intriguing perspective on rose-colored glasses which helps to illuminate Dr. Izzo's point. Miller invites us to imagine the world looking back at us through our rose-colored glasses, reflecting back scenery that has been painted "with the themes and colours we seek" (p. 68). Miller intimates that rose-colored glasses bring definition to the constraints of our world so that we can find our own room for expansion.

Rose-colored glasses invite us to make a distinction between illusion and idealism, between nostalgia for a lost Eden and inspiration for a new Utopia. As Prof. Griswold notes, "it is possible to remain innocent without being ignorant." While critics fear donning blinders of false optimism, proponents embrace filtering out defeatist views. People like Carol Loy Miller see rose-colored glasses as a means for new levels of self-awareness and new avenues for transformation. The glasses could be likened to virtual reality goggles, allowing the user to preview a bright world of possibility. Along those lines, one might consider rose-colored glasses the perfect accessory to a set of blueprints. For at the end of the day, the "real world" is only as colorful as we decide to make it—the glow of sunset notwithstanding.

by Malingering

by Wonderlane

by Ms Oddgers

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]

by Ruud!

I’m sitting in my mother’s arms in a brown aura of gloom sent up by her bathrobe — it has cords hanging, like the cords in movies, bellrope for Catherine Empress, but brown, hanging around the bathrobe belt — . . . old Chrismas morning bathrobe with conventional diamonds or squares design, but the brown of the color of life, the color of the brain, the gray brown brain, and the first color I noticed after the rainy grays of my first views of the world in the spectrum from the crib so dumb.
—Jack Kerouac, Dr. Sax, 1959.