Musings on great art, the color palette

Mrs. Brad was talking with a friend and I was listening.

Except it sounded like gibberish: They were discussing art.

I like art. Specifically, I like Art Howe, Art Monk, Art Garfunkel and Art Linkletter. But on a different level, I enjoy works of art. The statue of David. The statue of Willie Mays. The painting of dogs playing poker. Finding Waldo. All the great art of the world.

But colors? They make me laugh.

In the discussion referenced earlier, Mrs. Brad and her friend were looking at a color palette, discussing the names. As if they made sense.

Sap green. Payne's gray. Cadmium yellow light. Quina-cridone magenta. (To be fair, they didn't say those. I found those on a color wheel. But they said words like that.)

It was all mumbo jumbo, which is typical. Everybody takes what we understand and makes it complicated.

It's like medicine, where they come up with drugs that start with X or Z to treat a malady that has a multisyllabic name ("Take new Xaxoplaxin, to treat the symptoms of Ribertosom Syndrome.")

Similarly, listen to the sideline reporter at a sports event, explaining how your favorite player has an abrasion on his head and a contusion on his hip. Oh no! It's serious: a scrape on his face and a bruised hip.

Anyway, it's the same thing with colors, although there's apparently a reason for it.

Turns out that, contrary to what I believed in my childhood, there are more than 64 colors.

Seriously. Shocking, right?

Sixty-four seemed like a lot – and that was the outer limit, of course, because that was size of the Mac Daddy of crayon boxes, which only rich or artistic kids possessed. The 64-crayon box with a sharpener? To me, that must have included every conceivable color, a fact made obvious by the inclusion of not just blue, but sky blue and blue-green.

(We can't ignore, of course, the "flesh" crayon. Not only was that racist, it was wrong. That was not even my skin color. And it creeped me out to call it "flesh," which seemed like something a monster would eat.)

Anyway, it turns out there are more than 64 colors. And it turns out that the naming committee for the colors has the freedom to go crazy.

Cerulean blue, by the way, is next to patholo blue on our palette – which actually is a color-mixing guide. In other words, it allows you to combine burnt sienna with raw umber and come up with a new color (medium slumber?).

You want your house to be white? Do you mean eggshell, alabaster or chiffon porcelain?

That's a blue shirt? Do you mean navy, Aegean, azure, admiral or arctic?

And those are the fundamental colors – the ones that Big Paint, the conglomeration of major paint producers, largely agree on.

Here's all I know: When Cassius Marcellus Coolidge was painting, he probably didn't use terms like eggshell, raw umber and patholo blue. The great Coolidge likely used white, brown and blue on his masterpiece.

Who's he? Oh, I guess I get to play the role of art expert now: Coolidge, of course, was the American genius who painted the "Dogs Playing Poker" series starting in the 1890s.

Sap green, indeed.

Brad Stanhope is a noted art critic and former Daily Republic editor. Reach him at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.