Edith Young is an artist, designer, and writer from New York. Princeton Architectural Press published her first book, Color Scheme: An Irreverent History of Art and Pop Culture Through Color Palettes, in 2021.
This is the final podcast episode of 2022! I hope you have a wonderful, safe, and healthy holiday season. I look forward to good things coming in 2023!
Episode Notes
Edith’s work: www.edith.nyc
Edith’s palette prints: www.edithyoung.com
Book: Color Scheme: An Irreverent History of Art and Pop Culture Through Color Palettes
PolicyViz blog post on color
Related Episodes
Episode #203: Alli Torban
Episode #226: Abby Covert
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Transcript
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Welcome back to the PolicyViz podcast. I am your host, Jon Schwabish. On this week’s episode of the show, which is the final show of 2022, I’m very happy to chat with Edith Young. Edith has written this really fun book called Color Scheme: An Irreverent History of Art and Pop Culture in Color Palettes. We talk all about her background, all about her work, all about her excitement about color in art and in paintings. And then, we also talked about how she actually got all of the more than 500 colors out of the different paintings and into this book. It’s a really fun book, I mean, I’m not an art history person, like, I don’t have any training or really any knowledge about art history, as I admit to her straight up in the conversation that you’re about to hear, but I really did enjoy this book. It was really fun to go through all the color palettes, and go through all the color shades. And if you’re really interested in learning more about those color shades by the way, I’m going to have a separate blog post on policyviz.com that will give you the CMYK, RGB and hex codes for all of the more than 500 colors in the book. So if you have the book and you like the colors, and you want to use them in your work, I’ve got them all sitting for you elsewhere on the PolicyViz site, so you can go in and grab them.
So as I mentioned, this is the last episode of the show for 2022. I hope you have enjoyed all the various guests and conversations along with the show. I am so grateful that you spend every other week with me listening to folks working in the fields of data and data visualization, and design different authors, different designers, folks doing amazing work in and around the field of data visualization. And so, I hope you’ll enjoy this last episode of the show for this year, I’ll be back in January with a whole bunch of new great guests. So here we go, last episode of the year, here’s my conversation with Edith Young.
Jon Schwabish: Hi Edith, good evening, how are you, a nighttime broadcast interview?
Edith Young: Hello, yes.
JS: I don’t do these very often. It’s like post daylight savings, so it’s like dark outside.
EY: I know, it’s a little bit terrifying.
JS: It’s really not that late, but it feels like a nighttime episode – PolicyViz Podcast after dark – definitely a different kind of show. So I’m excited to chat with you about your – now, do you still call it a new book?
EY: It’s now a year old, yeah. So I don’t know what that…
JS: Yeah.
EY: Toddler.
JS: Not quite, right, just the toddler, right. Really interesting book, especially, I think folks who are into art history are going to get a ton out of it, which is not me, but I got a lot out of it and really enjoyed it, but I’m not an art history buff. So I think those were like artists are going to get a ton out of it, so I want to ask you a few questions about the book in the background, and then, I want to ask you a couple of technical questions about it. So maybe we could just start simply, just talk a little bit about your background and what led you to write this kind of book.
EY: Of course, thank you so much for having me. And I do not have a classic data visualization background, whatever that may look like. I work in art, in design, and I went to art school, which is important because that’s where this idea germinated. And so, basically, the sort of origin story for the book is that while I was at art school, we would have these long studio classes and these critiques, and so my friend and I would go to the local movie theater to blow off some steam. And we saw one day this documentary, I think it was from 2011 on Diana Vreeland, who was an editor for a long time at Harper’s Bazaar and at Vogue, and she had sort of a grandiose, larger than life personality, and said all of these very quotable things mostly about aesthetics.
And so, in the movie, they quote this excerpt from her autobiography where – I’m going to read it – she says – I wouldn’t dare misquote her – she says, “All my life I’ve pursued the perfect red. I can never get painters to mix it for me. It’s exactly as if I’d said, “I want Rococo with a spot of Gothic in it, and a bit of Buddhist temple” – they have no idea what I’m talking about. About the best red is to copy the color of a child’s cap in any Renaissance portrait.” And I thought that was very compelling in a sort of sitting in the dark theater, thinking about how it was both like incredibly inexact and sort of ludicrous sounding, and also kind of charming and true, and how those two things could be possible at once.
JS: Right.
EY: So then I was just sort of thinking about how you could sort of debunk and reinforce that idea at the same time in a color palette that draws from all of these paintings from the era that he’s talking about, all these Renaissance portraits, and thinking about how you designed out like a color chart, from Benjamin Moore [inaudible 00:06:21]. And so, I wrote that idea on my phone during the movie, and then put it away. And then years, years later into my school experience, I made this print of the reds of the red caps in Renaissance portraits. And I stayed up late, collecting all these paintings from that era, and trying to be very organized, and then, selecting these colors and putting them in this gridded array. So that was the beginning of the project.
JS: What drew you to that quote, was it this idea of trying to obtain, like, this perfect color, or was it the fact that there is no such thing, like, what drew you to it?
EY: Yeah, I think, I mean, in the print that I made, there are 20 examples of these caps that she’s talking about, and so, that, I mean, from that example alone, it’s not – what she’s saying is not possible, there’s no such perfect red. But at the same time, like, if you have a little bit of familiarity with the concept she’s talking about, you also know, you can kind of get a general sense of what you mean. So I think it was sort of the duality of those ideas, and holding them both in your mind at the same time.
JS: So, like I said, I’m not an art history buff, although, as I was telling you before we started, my mom is, and my mom was loving the book, because it’s like, it’s just – I don’t know how to describe it, like, the book, you kind of have this whimsical combination of these historical artwork, and then, let’s pull out this color, this color from each of these paintings, and I’m wondering, when you think about your reader, what do you hope that they get out of it?
EY: So I think it’s a book that can work both for people who are kind of art history buffs, and people who feel pretty intimidated by it. I think my inspiration at the beginning was someone like my brother, who is very smart and didn’t have like sort of the knowledge that I have about this subject, and thinking like how can I make it so that he would be very intrigued by it and find a very accessible entry point to jump in. So I think the palettes each have their own page, and can be enjoyed on their own as this isn’t very humble, but as their own piece of art I think. But ideally also it might trigger or pique the curiosity of someone who says, oh, I don’t really know what this is talking about, I don’t know why she’s talking about this painter, Wayne Tebow, and why are there the greens of the garnishes throughout this page. And so, then you look up his work, and that sort of puts you on a little bit of a goose chase to figure out how this theme has emerged in his work. And so, I just like the idea of, and I think color, you know, there’s so much levity to color in most cases. And so, it feels like a really nice way to segue into this subject matter.
JS: Yeah, it’s interesting, because the way I hear you describe it is if you were to teach a class, an art history class, then it sounds like the way you would bring people into that is through color and not necessarily through form or curvature or the different types of painting that seems like colors are so accessible for people.
EY: Yes, I mean, I think a good teacher would teach you all of those things, but I think that that is the angle that I found that I haven’t seen that’s existed elsewhere.
JS: Yeah. So how did you pick the spreads in the book, because there’s, I don’t know, about 20 or 30 different spreads, so how did you go through and pick those?
EY: I think there may be 40 palettes in total, and they’re very subjective, I mean, I would say that I think the whole project is fairly subjective, and I think that’s a bit of an interesting attention to me, especially, when it comes to data visualization, which I can get into a little bit in a bit. But I think that it started off, they’re really led by the titles of the work, so once you’re starting with reds of the red caps in Renaissance portraits, it’s a bit of a mouthful, but I think there is something a little bit, a little irreverent and humorous about it. And I liked the idea of trying to find these other things that are a little bit like punch lines or zingers when you see the palette itself.
So basically, I mean, this definitely started as a conceptual art project, and it was this system where I created these rules, and then I had to find things that applied within my system of rules. And so, sometimes that was like, if I were at a museum, and I saw a piece and it sort of gave me this idea, I wonder if there are more paintings like this, were they, I wonder what the wings of the angel and all the other annunciation paintings look like, or something like that. And sometimes, it was a little bit more obvious to me what someone might think was a little bit funny about an artist body of work. But yeah, I would say, definitely through a somewhat personal lens of art that I like or art that amused me.
JS: Okay, so let’s talk about the practical piece, because this is the question – my mom’s going to listen to this episode, and she’s going to give me a hard time about keep referencing her. But this is the question my mom asked, and it’s a question I had written down, so I can’t give her full credit – but how did you build it? Because getting those exact colors out of a painting in real life into digital print or into print, it’s got to be not easy.
EY: Yes, so it is and it isn’t, I would say, like, I consider the process of this work much more about the idea and the research, than, ultimately, the technical aspect, which I think is fairly simple, if you admit to yourself that it would be somewhat impossible to get the perfect hex code of whatever Bonacelli was painting with at the time. I’m in, when hex codes were not even a glimmer in his eye. When I’m working on one that has to do with art history, I try to work with these images that are from the museum in our as white balanced as possible, and directly from their art archive where they’ve been photographed with a gigantic Hasselblad camera.
And so, that’s about as far as I can get with accuracy, and then, from there, I would say, I’m mostly, I’m like, in an Adobe program, and there’s an eyedropper tool, and I’m using that and going in and once you zoom in too far, there are so many reds in this one cap, but I am looking for a red that feels the most representative, like, it feels like it would be sort of the average if you were to average all these colors together, and also, if you walked away from the painting, what you would think kind of resembles what you saw, if it were just in your mind’s eye.
JS: Yeah, oh interesting. So practically, it’s the Eyedropper tool that everybody has and their regular PowerPoint tool or whatever. But then this last part is interesting, so when you do that, and you find the color, did you kind of zoom all the way out and sort of have the painting on one side of your screen and the red that you chose on the other side of screen, just sort of like getting that feeling?
EY: Yes, I mean, definitely, sometimes it takes a few tries, because I don’t feel like I’ve accurately picked the right one. But yes, I’m looking at them both at the same time.
JS: And did you feel in that process that you engaged with the art and the artists in like a different way than when you’re just looking at it on the wall – because you’re diving in, it’s like, you’re like the Ferris Bueller movie in real life.
EY: Yeah, I mean, I think I do. I don’t know – I’m not sure that I have like a spiritual moment with the colors when I’m working with them, digitally. But I think often like the surprises that I find are more so, especially when I’m proved wrong by an idea, so there’s this one print that I referenced before that I worked on after the book came out, but it’s the Wings of the Annunciation, and that’s a biblical scene that has been depicted in art history, many times and is one of my favorites as someone who learned a lot about religion through art history. But I would say, I had this idea where I would pluck the colors from the wings. And then I sort of said, while I was making the book, it was on my list of ideas, and I said, well, it’s going to be all white, I’m not sure that’s the most compelling palette, I’ll move on to the next thing.
And then, I went to the Cloisters last spring, and I saw an altarpiece where they had Gabriel the angel and his wings, and it was a totally different color than I would have imagined. And so, then I went back to that idea, and saw there, like, there are kind of these groovy colors that everyone uses in that era, because they’re just, you know, it’s what they’re envisioned to be happening in that moment, and they can’t draw from a photograph or something like that. So they were like incredibly modern colors that they were using, and so, I think in those instances, I’m especially excited when it feels a little bit like a discovery made through the typology.
JS: Right, that’s really interesting. You’ve talked about a few that you really liked, but is there a favorites spread or a favorite painting or artist that you have?
EY: Well, one thing I think we haven’t really talked about is there’s kind of pop culture section at the end which is visual culture, and, I would say, there’s a real emphasis on sports. And so, one of my favorites is the spread of Dennis Rodman’s hair dye over the course of his NBA career. I mean, it’s the only one that’s two pages, there’s so much to draw from, and, I mean, I just thought that was so fun. But in terms of artists, I mean, it’s hard to narrow it down, but one that I loved especially is named Alex Katz. He is a painter who actually – his retrospective just opened at the Guggenheim, I haven’t seen it yet. And there’s a little bit of a nod to him in one of the palettes, which is of seascapes from the 20th century. And I would say, that’s one where I played around the most with sort of the visualization format, where most of the palettes throughout the book are in this square or rectangular composition in the grid. And in this one, there are these rectangles of the colors, and they’re organized – basically, they’re all on the same horizon line, but they’re in a different place, depending on where the seascapes horizon is in that painting. So that’s my little homage to him, because I couldn’t really figure out how to fit him in otherwise, he’s one of those paintings.
JS: Right. But it’s also interesting to link it back, as you were talking about earlier, back to DataViz, because you’re kind of taking color and matching it to a visual, you know, you’re using the color to actually create a visualization out of these various paintings. When you think about color, and you think about people making charts and graphs and diagrams, do you look at color in a particular way, when you see people using a shade of blue in that graph in the Washington Post, and like, ah, that’s not the right shade of blue?
EY: Yeah, I mean, sometimes, certainly with many things in the world, you think this could be more aesthetically pleasing. But I also think, they’re trying to get an idea across, in a way that is pretty clear. The thing that interests me about the way that these palettes do relate to DataViz is that the format makes it look, and I read about this a little bit in the book, but the format of a palette is sort of a very persuasive image, like, it looks very factual. It’s just sort of, like, I think it’s a fairly convincing visual, and I think that tension is interesting with this subject matter that is actually fairly subjective and very perception based. But I think it does make an argument for how DataViz can be such a strong kind of way of getting ideas across, and possibly a little bit persuasive, whether or not what it’s telling is true.
JS: Yeah. So when do you thought about organizing them aside from the seascape one, when you thought about organizing them, did you play with other layouts for some of the other paintings, or was it just pretty natural, I’m going to do this as a grid, because I’ve got X number of paintings, and it kind of makes sense to do it that way?
EY: Yeah, I think because they were mostly referencing the color charts, I think the paint charts that you would get at the hardware store, I kept them fairly in line with that. I’ve played around with it a little bit since then, but I think they still, they’re not far off from what you would pick up from your paint store. I mean, it’s definitely, the whole project has made me very curious about other ways of working with DataViz, so there’s definitely a lot of potential.
JS: Yeah, absolutely. So when you envision your core reader, and they’re sitting down with this spread, and they’ve got the paintings on the one side, and they’ve got the boxes of the colors on the other side, how are you hoping that they interact with that spread?
EY: I mean, I think, ideally, everyone wants someone to look at their work for more than two seconds, but that’s not always what happens. I think it kind of depends on the type of reader, but I do like the idea of it as a gateway of that – I don’t want to create a reading experience where you’re constantly going back and forth between your iPad and looking all these things up. But I think, kind of, making a list of these things that interest you, and then, looking them up later and kind of delving deeper into those artists and those artworks, definitely would be a win for me. Like, if it just made someone engage more with this thing that felt unfamiliar with them before.
JS: So before we wrap up, so you mentioned your favorite spread is the seascapes, but is Cats your favorite artist in the book, or do you have a favorite artist there as well?
EY: I mean, I would say, Cats is my favorite artist and that the seascapes is not my favorite palette.
JS: Yeah.
EY: Yeah, I mean, I love a lot of the artists in the book, but there are, I mean, a few that, I don’t know, Fernando Botero is one that has a really kind of like punchy tropical palette in the book, and he is known for – he’s a Colombian artist painter who’s known for painting people and objects in really exaggerated forms. It’s pretty recognizable – there’s a very popular meme of his work. And so, definitely, I would say, for the most part, the palettes all revolve around artists who I really like for one reason or another, yeah.
JS: I was kind of hoping you’re going to say Dennis Rodman is your favorite artist, because…
EY: He’s up there, for sure.
JS: He’s up there, yeah. This is great. It’s very cool. Edith, thanks so much for coming on the show. I really enjoyed the book, it was just a really nice read, just enjoy all these colors, and thanks so much for taking some time out on an evening to chat with me.
EY: Well, thank you. Thank you so much.
And thanks everyone, for tuning into this week’s episode of the show. I hope you enjoyed that conversation. I hope you’ll check out Edith’s book. I hope you’ll check out the other blog posts that I wrote, where you can go grab all those color palettes. If you would like to help support the show, you’ve got a little time now, maybe you’ve got a break in these last couple of weeks of the year. If you’d like to support the show, head over to your favorite podcast provider, put in a review, put in a rating. If you’d like to support the show financially, head over to Patreon or Winno, or you can even go to PayPal for a one-time donation to the show that helps me cover the editing and the transcription and all the good stuff that I need to bring this show to you every other week. So again, I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode. I hope you enjoyed the show. Thanks so much for listening. Have a great holiday season. Have a great New Year. And until next time in 2023, this is the PolicyViz podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
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