Color is one of the building blocks of art. Imagine all the new art that could be created if artists had a radically expanded palette at their disposal.
That’s what crossed my mind when I first saw the book The Universe in 100 Colors: Weird and Wondrous Colors from Science and Nature, a collaboration between science educator Terry Mudge and artist Tyler Thrasher that is set to be published next month by Sasquatch Books.
As it happens, for the Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Thrasher, the starting point for the project was his own very unusual type of sculpture-making. After studying computer animation, he decided he wanted to pursue an art career. To that end, he spent years creating his own method for “growing” opals, the semiprecious stones known for their iridescent color, encrusting everyday objects with them. Back in 2015, his series of opal-covered insects caught on online, and they remain one of his artistic signatures (he also sells glowing flowers).
Tyler Thrasher, Opalized cicada shell (2021). Courtesy Tyler Thrasher.
Thrasher’s study of opals also proved to be the gateway to a larger interest in how color works. “To me, opals embody the absolute magic of color,” he told me by Zoom. “You see this photonic display that is otherworldly, it feels like this other universe you are staring into—it’s hard not to fall in love with color when you’ve grown an opal.”
“Opal” gets an entry in The Universe in 100 Colors. Other entries range literally from the everyday to the cosmic, from Landlord White—the most-produced paint in the world, since its off-white hides grime in a way that a pure white does not—to Cosmic Latte, a term astronomers use for the “eggnog-like color” that is the “average color of our observable universe.”
There are also colors that are rare and forgotten. Sometimes this is because their source has been lost, like the “soft, blushy pink” of Ancient Chlorophyll, which scientists synthesized in 2015 from the billions-of-years-old remains of microorganisms, constituting “the oldest scientifically documented pigment on Earth.” Sometimes this is because they are deemed to be too toxic, like Orpiment, a regal orange used by Raphael and Bellini, among others, now understood to be immensely dangerous due its arsenic content.
Raphael, Sistine Madonna (ca. 1513–14), which uses orpiment for the orange vestiments.
Other colors are the product of science experiments or industry, like Yinmn Blue, a recently synthesized ultra-blue (my Artnet colleague Sarah Cascone had a hand in popularizing it). Or there’s the delightful Sonoluminescence, an enigmatic high-frequency blue-purple created by the energy released by the explosive sound of tiny bubbles collapsing in extreme experimental conditions, discovered in 1934.
And there are colors that tell you something about perception itself, like Eigengrau. That’s the name for what you perceive when there is no light input at all—not black, but a “deep, dark, fuzzy gray.” As the book explains, Eigengrau is “a color field fabricated by our brains as a survival mechanism because it allows us to still observe contrast if needed,” letting us to (hopefully) pick out predators even against a pitch black background.
Thrasher’s collaborator Mudge runs Matter, a subscription service that mails out a selection of cool scientific material for educational purposes each month. It describes itself as a “science museum in a box.” The two were studio-mates, and the idea of documenting the properties of the odd materials Mudge was assembling was one of the seeds of the book. For his part, Thrasher fuses artistic and scientific experiments in his work, and bills himself as “Your Personal Mad Scientist.”
The Universe in 100 Colors: Weird and Wondrous Colors from Science and Nature by Tyler Thrasher and Terry Mudge (Penguin Random House, 2024).
Rooted in their combined background in popular science, The Universe in 100 Colors is an excellent primer, offering accessible explanations of the many complex factors that combine to make up the experience we perceive of as “color”—not just the properties of light or pigment, but mental conditions and the molecular composition of surfaces. (The latter gives us so-called “structural color,” one example being the “neatly and tightly packed arrangement of silica nanoparticles” that give opals their special color properties.)
But mainly, the book is just a mind-expanding joy. It does as much to make you excited about looking as it does to explain vision scientifically—which is very much the spirit in which it is intended. “Putting it together has given me a deep appreciation for all the wonderful, magical things around us that we take for granted: the color of a butterfly chrysalis, the goldness of gold,” Thrasher told me. “I hope it gives people a way to appreciate the seemingly mundane—which is, in fact, very, very exciting.”