No, not Easter egg dyes. This is a wilder world of color - a celebration of Spring when Hindus in India throw, squirt and smear heaps of dry and wet colors on each other.

The Hindu celebration of Holi (also known as the Festival of Colors) is celebrated the day after the first full moon in March, For most, it's a time to shed inhibitions and be merry. Spring fun at its best. The colorful antics may also provide medicinal benefits. Many believe that the weather changes can cause viral fevers and colds. The colored powders were typically made of medicinal herbs - a tradition which continues in some parts of the world today.

Maybe the tradition of dyeing Easter eggs can be coupled with this Indian rite in the Western world next year.

It's the time of the year when many people take part in the tradition of dying eggs for Easter. Most just buy a simple kit and dye away. Once again, this continues the recent theme in this blog about the commercialization of color. Of note: PAAS Dye Company started making commercial in the 1800s (not the 1900s) - but commercial dyes didn't gain mass popularity until after World War II.

As an alternative to commercial dyes, get in touch with natural color by using onion skins, beets, cabbage and even turmeric to dye your Easter eggs. This also gets to the historical roots of coloring Easter eggs. For example, early settlers in the U.S. would wrap eggs in onion skins to create a marbled effect on the shell.

It's a little more work, but not that much more. Plus it's a lot of fun. See How to make Natural Dyes.

More information:
About Easter
Why do we paint eggs on Easter?

Color Factoid: Red eggs are the brightest symbol of Greek Easter, representing the blood of Christ and rebirth. Read more: Red-Dyed Easter Eggs

The Commercialization of Color
March 10, 2008

"You put color into products you make because . . . color sells." Sound familiar? Actually the full quote dates back to the 1948 Fuller Paint catalogue. As follows:

Color Engineering ups morale - makes production costs go down

You put color into products you make because your sales department knows that color sells. If your product can't be colored, you put it into a colorful package. If color can make your customers buy more, color can make your employees try more. It's the same basic emotional response. Color Engineering by Fuller proves it.

As follow-up to the previous post about the MOMA exhibit, this historical source is worth noting. While we take for granted the thousands of colors available by paint manufacturers today, the availability of commercial house paint (in perhaps only 50 colors) was an amazing milestone in the 1940s . . . and the technology to make colored products - as we know them today - didn't exist.

The pyschology of the Fuller sales pitch is also quite interesting. Although dated, the same arguments are recyled today.

See a large page from the catalogue.

Whatever happened to color? A new show - "Color Chart: Reinventing Color" - opened at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. The philosophical basis for the show is the disappearance of the spiritual aspects and scientific properties of color and the emergence of color as a commercial product. . .True????

The quest for the anti-aesthetic in art overtook the quest for beauty in the first half of the 20th century (See the work of Duchamp and Warhol for examples.) That is old news. However, it's worth making a distinction about two kinds of art today: There is the world of "serious art" – art that is shown in prestigious museums, artwork that makes history. On the other side of the art scene today is the decorative world of lush landscape paintings and leaping dolphin sculptures. The MOMA exhibit focuses on the formal art historical category of images and objects.

As for color, you may have heard that "color is the most relative of all the ingredients in art." I've often asked what this really means. My best answer has been that we always see color in a context.  A red flower against green leaves. As Josef Albers demonstrated, any color can look wildly different depending on its context. However, a commentary on the exhibit provided a fresh take on the "relative" nature of color. Consider this: Color can't be verified by our senses. Unlike materials (or mass or height, etc.), you can verify that a sculpture is steel by touching it. However, if you think a painting's greenness isn't really green, touching it won't confirm or deny its color.*

It's worth a few minutes (or more) to see the web site devoted to the exhibit.
See MOMA-"Color Chart: Reinventing Color

Jill Morton
Copyright (c) 2008