Many shades of cyan
Oct. 2nd, 2021 04:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustTuesday started out pleasantly enough, but soon started to rain, and didn't stop. This was the day we spent sitting under a gazebo in J and J's garden.
Wednesday was bright and sunny, and we accompanied a different J to a photographic exhibition in a dimly lit gallery.
So it goes.
It has been too long since we saw the Bears, so when GirlBear suggested that we meet in York - which is not by some distance halfway, but would give them an opportunity to see J and J at the same time - we thought this was a great idea. Although the Bears have been using public transport for some time, they are not yet ready to meet others indoors (hey, we all set our own boundaries) so Plan A was to book lunch somewhere where we could sit outside. But although J identified some promising cafés, none of them would take a booking for their outdoor tables - because if it rains, their outdoor customers want to move indoors, and unpleasantness ensues. Plan B, therefore, was that J and J should erect their gazebo (they are keen gardeners, and use it for drying the year's crop of onions) in their garden ...
By the time this was settled, we had already booked train tickets on the assumption that our destination was the city centre - first train journey in several years, and I was a little nervous. But we had booked far enough in advance that it was not a ridiculous extravagance to travel first class, so there was no risk of being overcrowded; in fact, though mask-wearing on the platform was maybe 50/50, and the people leaving the train in Durham (mostly students arriving for the new term) were almost unanimously not wearing masks, first class southbound was entirely masked. Noted for what this sample is worth, and in the consciousness that it's not worth all that much. We had selected out trains to arrive in York half an hour before the Bears, and leave half an hour after; J met us at the station and accompanied us home by bus - and then walked us to the bus stop for our return journey - and this all worked very smoothly.
We arrived in time to settle ourselves under the gazebo before the rain began, so each stage of the weather was only a gradual deterioration in the one before: when J brought us cups of tea she remarked that it was beginning to rain, by lunchtime it was definitely raining and we moved our chairs further into the shelter, and put on coats or blankets or both; coffee after lunch was preceded by adding walls to a couple of sides of the gazebo, and J swapping her sandals for boots. We drank our coffee and commented that for the classic British holiday this should a bus shelter and we chould be eating fish and chips (though half of us are vegetarians, so maybe not).
We didn't only talk about the weather. Indeed, we talked of many things, though not necesarily of shoes, or ships or sealing wax. Seasickness and small boats were mentioned, and holidays past and future, in Yorkshire and Cornwall and Italy and France... One of the coffee mugs was of that design which combines a solid colour with its Pantone number - it was 'Pantone Blue C', a pleasant shade of blue but rather a dull name, which led us to What is cyan anyway? and does it have anything to do with the Greek for 'dog' which lies at the root of 'cynic'? 'No' to the latter, and I said 'not that' to the former, because I think of it as an 'aqua' blue, but Wikipedia offers many shades of cyan, and links the word with cornflowers, which is not far off. From here we strayed to Cynar, infamous in our circle because my mother had a bottle of Cynar which she would try to persuade us to drink by describing it as 'artichoke liqueur' (which sounded almost reasonable compared to some of her home-made wines). This isn't entirely untrue, but 'artichoke bitters' would have warned the unwary to approach it with caution. As it was, that bottle hung around for uite a while, and gained quite a reputation. But what about Cynara, I wondered, she to whom we have been faithful in our fashion: was she an artichoke? Yes, it turns out, she was. Well, well...
So that was fun. The next day we had a date with another J, to see an exhibition of photographs by Elaine Vizor (on Facebook) at a gallery in Newton Aycliffe (there's an art gallery in Newton Aycliffe? Apparently so, based in the community college. (ETA: There was at the time of writing, but the website seems to have vanished, so who knows...?).
The exhibition brought together two sets of photographs, made "With or Without" a camera. "With" were large prints on canvas showing light trails in darkness, captured with a long exposure and minimum of control of the camera: some of the results were purely abstract, others gave a hint of scenery (Durham cathedral or Aberdeen harbour). I could imagine these - particularly the latter - hanging on the walls of a smart hotel, decorative but a bit anonymous. "Without" was a lockdown project, using material already to hand to make cyanotype omages - think Anna Atkins' Victorian images of seaweed, placed on treated paper to create a stencilled image. Elaine Vizor had used an assortment of objects, of which the most successful, I thought, were the feathers, but the real impact came not from any individual piece but from the accumulation of variations on a theme, the deep blue rectangles covering the walls and festooned from the ceiling. For the record, if I had not had some idea of the process beforehand, I would have described the colour as indigo.
All of which was interesting. But the two cards I bought from the gallery's stock were by Sharron Bates, two scenes collaged from a variety of old papers, Arguments Yard, Whitby and the Old Fulling Mill in Durham. I seem to have been lucky, because browsing her site now, these are still by some margin my favourites.
Wednesday was bright and sunny, and we accompanied a different J to a photographic exhibition in a dimly lit gallery.
So it goes.
It has been too long since we saw the Bears, so when GirlBear suggested that we meet in York - which is not by some distance halfway, but would give them an opportunity to see J and J at the same time - we thought this was a great idea. Although the Bears have been using public transport for some time, they are not yet ready to meet others indoors (hey, we all set our own boundaries) so Plan A was to book lunch somewhere where we could sit outside. But although J identified some promising cafés, none of them would take a booking for their outdoor tables - because if it rains, their outdoor customers want to move indoors, and unpleasantness ensues. Plan B, therefore, was that J and J should erect their gazebo (they are keen gardeners, and use it for drying the year's crop of onions) in their garden ...
By the time this was settled, we had already booked train tickets on the assumption that our destination was the city centre - first train journey in several years, and I was a little nervous. But we had booked far enough in advance that it was not a ridiculous extravagance to travel first class, so there was no risk of being overcrowded; in fact, though mask-wearing on the platform was maybe 50/50, and the people leaving the train in Durham (mostly students arriving for the new term) were almost unanimously not wearing masks, first class southbound was entirely masked. Noted for what this sample is worth, and in the consciousness that it's not worth all that much. We had selected out trains to arrive in York half an hour before the Bears, and leave half an hour after; J met us at the station and accompanied us home by bus - and then walked us to the bus stop for our return journey - and this all worked very smoothly.
We arrived in time to settle ourselves under the gazebo before the rain began, so each stage of the weather was only a gradual deterioration in the one before: when J brought us cups of tea she remarked that it was beginning to rain, by lunchtime it was definitely raining and we moved our chairs further into the shelter, and put on coats or blankets or both; coffee after lunch was preceded by adding walls to a couple of sides of the gazebo, and J swapping her sandals for boots. We drank our coffee and commented that for the classic British holiday this should a bus shelter and we chould be eating fish and chips (though half of us are vegetarians, so maybe not).
We didn't only talk about the weather. Indeed, we talked of many things, though not necesarily of shoes, or ships or sealing wax. Seasickness and small boats were mentioned, and holidays past and future, in Yorkshire and Cornwall and Italy and France... One of the coffee mugs was of that design which combines a solid colour with its Pantone number - it was 'Pantone Blue C', a pleasant shade of blue but rather a dull name, which led us to What is cyan anyway? and does it have anything to do with the Greek for 'dog' which lies at the root of 'cynic'? 'No' to the latter, and I said 'not that' to the former, because I think of it as an 'aqua' blue, but Wikipedia offers many shades of cyan, and links the word with cornflowers, which is not far off. From here we strayed to Cynar, infamous in our circle because my mother had a bottle of Cynar which she would try to persuade us to drink by describing it as 'artichoke liqueur' (which sounded almost reasonable compared to some of her home-made wines). This isn't entirely untrue, but 'artichoke bitters' would have warned the unwary to approach it with caution. As it was, that bottle hung around for uite a while, and gained quite a reputation. But what about Cynara, I wondered, she to whom we have been faithful in our fashion: was she an artichoke? Yes, it turns out, she was. Well, well...
So that was fun. The next day we had a date with another J, to see an exhibition of photographs by Elaine Vizor (on Facebook) at a gallery in Newton Aycliffe (there's an art gallery in Newton Aycliffe? Apparently so, based in the community college. (ETA: There was at the time of writing, but the website seems to have vanished, so who knows...?).
The exhibition brought together two sets of photographs, made "With or Without" a camera. "With" were large prints on canvas showing light trails in darkness, captured with a long exposure and minimum of control of the camera: some of the results were purely abstract, others gave a hint of scenery (Durham cathedral or Aberdeen harbour). I could imagine these - particularly the latter - hanging on the walls of a smart hotel, decorative but a bit anonymous. "Without" was a lockdown project, using material already to hand to make cyanotype omages - think Anna Atkins' Victorian images of seaweed, placed on treated paper to create a stencilled image. Elaine Vizor had used an assortment of objects, of which the most successful, I thought, were the feathers, but the real impact came not from any individual piece but from the accumulation of variations on a theme, the deep blue rectangles covering the walls and festooned from the ceiling. For the record, if I had not had some idea of the process beforehand, I would have described the colour as indigo.
All of which was interesting. But the two cards I bought from the gallery's stock were by Sharron Bates, two scenes collaged from a variety of old papers, Arguments Yard, Whitby and the Old Fulling Mill in Durham. I seem to have been lucky, because browsing her site now, these are still by some margin my favourites.
Cyan
Date: 2021-10-03 06:17 am (UTC)Re: Cyan
Date: 2021-10-03 02:36 pm (UTC)So now I'm wondering how cyan got chosen as a name for that blue-green element of the CYMK model which is not actually cyan...