Colored Glass

Olive and brown tones of antique glass bottles from San Francisco and other Western bottle companies.  All are bitters except the round bottle on the left.  Found these on Oregon Trail Antique Bottles and Glass website.

Color Change Mineral

1842 Hand painted lithograph with applied mica powder depicting the mineral Alexandrite Chrysoberyl and the color change it has in daylight (left) and incandescent (right).  From the publication Schriften der Russisch-Kaiserligen Geselschaft für die gesammte Mineralogie zu St. Petersburg.

I am searching for more information on the 1842 publication and geologist Asbjørn Halvorsen.

Green Water

Ernst Haas, Green Water, Mazatlan, Mexico, 1963

Faux Malachite

There is a bit of me that likes interpretations of malachite better than the real thing.  The concentric green organic shaped rings fascinate me.  Above image is Fornasetti's wallcovering version.

Hand painted, source unknown

Jim Thompson Fabric

The Bees Knees

Last year researchers found the nests of the bee Osmia avosetta in Turkey and Iran build nests layered with colorful flower petals.  The female bee digs a tunnel in the soil and then collects whole flower petals by biting them off of local flowers.  She takes the petals back to the nest and layers them with a thin middle layer of mud to create a cavity for her eggs and provisions.  The nests are beautiful natural art forms.

 

These photos are taken from the researcher’s abstract published by the American Museum of Natural History.  The full abstract can be found with on the American Museum of Natural History Research Library site along with the captions for the numbered photos.

 

 

Un-Common House Fly

I am fascinated!  All this time the amazing colors and patterns of the innocent (uh sort of) house fly have been unseen and undocumented.

Why?  Because insect wings are studied by biologists against a white background.  But as soon as they are studied on black backgrounds they are as incredible as butterfly wings!

Check out the full article on WIRED.

Tranquility

Ernst Haas - Parachute Flowers, 1967

Light and Color

Last weekend I visited the SUPRASENSORIAL: EXPERIMENTS IN LIGHT, COLOR, AND SPACE exhibit at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA.  One of the exhibits was a three compartment space lit with green, red and blue tones.  Transitioning from one space to the other and feeling the sensations related to color was an interesting experience.  The exhibit is in place until February 27th.