golden purples, and cobaltic blues
“First China’s sons, with early art elate,
Form’d the gay tea-pot, and the pictured plate;
Saw with illumined brow and dazzled eyes
In the red stove vitrescent colours rise;
Speck’d her tall beakers with enamel’d stars,
Her monster-josses, and gigantic jars;
Smear’d her huge dragons with metallic hues,
With golden purples, and cobaltic blues;
Bade on wide hills her porcelain castles glare,
And glazed Pagodas tremble in the air.”
—Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), from Botanic Garden.
the shining robe of day
“. . . Light itself, which every thing displays,
Shone undiscovered, till his brighter mind
Untwisted all the shining robe of day;
And, from the whitening undistinguished blaze,
Collecting every ray into his kind,
To the charmed eye educed the gorgeous train
Of parent colours. First the flaming red
Sprung vivid forth; the tawny orange next;
And next delicious yellow; by whose side
Fell the kind beams of all-refreshing green.
Then the pure blue, that swells autumnal skies,
Ethereal played; and then, of sadder hue,
Emerged the deepened indigo, as when
The heavy-skirted evening droops with frost;
While the last gleamings of refracted light
Died in the fainting violet away.”
—James Thomson (1700-48), To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton.
Tropic Sky
“Revlon was founded in 1932 by Charles Revson, with his brother Joseph and chemist Charles Lachman. The brand name is a slight modification of Revson’s name. Revlon lipstick and nail enamel became an instant market success story among female consumers, possibly because it was promoted with exotic names such as Tropic Sky, rather than merely descriptive ones such [as] dark red, medium red, pink, etc. The images that the Revlon names evoke are abstract ones associated with the exotic world of nature.”
—Marcel Danesi, Brands, 2006.
“beautiful woman”
“The eye contact that the female is perceived to make with the viewer in [many] . . . ads is particularly forceful as a sexual signifier. The pupils are generally dilated . . . . This comes as no surprise since the female face is perceived as more sexually attractive when the pupils are dilated. In fact, in earlier times in Italy, extracts of the drug belladonna were used for its cosmetic effect, given that it produces extreme dilation of the pupils. . . . [This] explain[s] the origin of its name, which in Italian means “beautiful woman.””
—Marcel Danesi, Brands, 2006.
Consider the letter X
“Consider the letter X . . . which comes from an Egyptian hieroglyph. As a rotated cross it acts, arguably, on our collective unconscious. It is what Jung called an archetype—symbols that are embedded in the collective unconscious of our species. The X was originally a pictograph and thus a symbol associated primarily with priests. It became an alphabet character later—every alphabet character, in fact, was born as a pictograph. The first alphabetic system emerged in the Middle East around 1000 BCE, and was then transported by the Phoenicians (a people from a territory on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, located largely in modern-day Lebanon) to Greece. It contained signs for consonant sounds only. When it reached Greece, signs for vowel sounds were added to it, making the Greek system the first full-fledged alphabetic one. . . .
In a fascinating book titled Sign after the X (2000), Marina Roy has traced the history of this sign, showing that it has had very little to do with phonetics at any period of its history. Here are a few of its traditional meanings:
• any unknown or unnamed factor, thing, or person
• the signature of any illiterate person
• the sign for mistake
• cancellation
• the unknown, especially in mathematics
• the multiplication symbol
• the Roman numeral ten
• a mechanical defect
• on a map a location
• choice on a ballot
• a motion-picture rating
• a symbol for Christ
• the symbol for a kiss
• the symbol for Chronos, the Greek god of Time
• the symbol for planet Saturn in Greek and Roman mythology.
Today, it stands for youth culture (Generation X), adventure comic heroes (X-Men), and erotic movies (X-rated).”
—Marcel Danesi, Brands, 2006.
ABCDEFGH
“Mary Stagg, Thomas Stagg, crucifix, 5 dots, shoe, crucifix, WS, man with stick, HK, dog, Gwynson, X Mary Robinson, Liberty, bracelet on right arm, Eliza Smith, O Sun and blue marks and rings all over right hand; man and woman, two men fighting, TS WS LS LHHS 1842, anchor, MSCS on left arm, blue dots and rings on fingers of left hand, H Stagg, William, crucifix, sun and moon on breast, ABCDEFGH on left leg, large scar on upper right arm.”
—the tattoos of twenty-three-year-old Charles Stagg, as listed on a “wanted” poster of the 1840s; quoted by Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, 1987.
Butterflies
Butterflies, a collage by Paul Dean, 2006. The newest piece in the exhibition Diamond Cutter, now showing at the Baton Rouge Gallery.
in their dialect, evil was literally called good
“So corrupt was their most ordinary language . . . that, in their dialect, evil was literally called good, and good, evil—the well-disposed man was branded wicked, whilst the leader in monstrous vice was styled virtuous.”
—William Ullathorne, a Catholic priest, on the convict society he encounted on Norfolk Island in the early 1800s; quoted by Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, 1987.
Tejo Remy’s Chest of Drawers
Tejo Remy’s Chest of Drawers (detail), 1991; used drawers, maple. At the Droog store, Amsterdam. Photo by Paul Dean.
Tasmanian bushrangers
“[T]he Tasmanian bushrangers began as convict kangaroo hunters who stayed out in the bush and formed gangs. . . .
They had long ratty hair, thick beards, roughly sewn garments and moccasins of kangaroo hide, a pistol stuck in a rope belt, a stolen musket, a polecat’s stench. When on raids, they blacked their faces with charcoal. Most of them would kill a man as soon as a kangaroo. Some joked about this.”
—Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, 1987.