Color Problems

About this book

A butterfly's wing becomes a grid of coloured squares. Pottery, leaves and fabrics are broken into measured arrangements of hue and proportion. Emily Noyes Vanderpoel had found a remarkable way to examine the colours of ordinary things.

Published at the beginning of the twentieth century, her study combines practical colour theory with hundreds of small diagrams and carefully observed examples. The charts can resemble abstract painting, although they were made to teach relationships between colours. A quiet lesson in looking closely becomes something unexpected: a visual archive of how the world can be reduced to colour without losing its character.