Gemma Tipton
speaker
50 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 13 Jul
Gemma Tipton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But colour is also the one thing that can't be described to the blind from birth.
Sky blue, ruby red, salmon pink, saffron yellow, duck egg, lilac.
Colour lays out the world in tones and hues before us, and yet it doesn't really exist.
Not in a fixed and stable way.
Light changes colour.
So does the ways our brains and eyes work, making it a uniquely personal experience.
The painter, Mark Rothko, was said to be happy to sit in his studio for hours, watching the way the change in qualities of daylight as it passed into evening affected his glorious colour-field paintings.
With light gone altogether, there's no colour at all.
As the 16th century proverb goes...
The writer of that piece of wisdom was actually trying to tell us not to get too hung up on youth and beauty when it comes to choosing lovers.
But he, and I'm assuming it was a he, also hit accurately on the fact that darkness makes colour fade away.
When you're depressed, one of the things you're supposed to do is concentrate on colour.
It's a thing to do even if you're not.
Look at the greens in nature until you really feel them, and as you do, you can feel your feelings change.
Another artist who understood this fundamentally was Joseph Albers.
Beginning in 1949, Albers made hundreds of paintings and prints based on different coloured squares.
Officially titled Homage to the Square, unofficially he called them Platters to Serve Colour, and with them explored how the right shade of red makes blue recede, though a certain orange casts red itself into the background.
and yellow can make different oranges dance.
Famously, he had thousands and thousands of tubes of paint, often many in the same shade but by a different maker.
So how did he choose his colours?
Showing 21–40 of 50 · page 2 of 3
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