On Color by David Scott Kastan with Stephen Farthing is a discursive look at 
color through the lens of art, literature and material culture. It began as a series of discussions between Kastan, a professor of English at Yale and Farthing, an artist and Emeritus Fellow at St. Edmund Hall, the University of Oxford. Happily, they decided to share their thoughts and turned their private chats into a book of provocative essays.
Through chapters with such headings as “Orange is the New Brown,” “White Lies,” “Basic Black” and “At the Violet Hour,” the discussion ranges from Audrey Hepburn’s dress in Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Monet’s waterlily paintings to Moby Dick. They touch on the science – physics – of color, and what it means to see a color – when you see red is it the same red I see? -but their emphasis is on the many, sometimes conflicting, connotations we give to colors.
When they write of art, they mean paintings and actual paint. There are no ceramics in this book except as included in a painting by Luis Egidio Meléndez. Still, I found their ideas useful and thought provoking. In “Moody Blues” they contemplate “something blue” and “true blue” as well as the blues and what a blue note is. “In Dy(e)ing for Indigo” (they treat indigo and blue separately) they examine the difficult and stinking labor involved in producing the dye and the dependence of dye production on slavery.
I found my mind wandering to the long history of cobalt blue in ceramics in China, Persia, and the Netherlands. I thought of the blue brush work on salt glazed jugs that early American potters favored. The palette I use in my work is earth toned and subdued but lately, I have been putting bands of cobalt on my rolled-rim bowls. These were inspired by my grandmother’s large mixing bowl. Hers was factory made, probably in the thirties. Each time I put a blue stripe on one of my bowls, I think of her, her kitchen, and the cabinet my grandfather made where she kept the bowl. These blue stripes often inspire memories in others. They will tell me about their grandmother or say that their mother had a bowl with brown stripes. So, I add these personal meanings to the meanings that Kastan and Farthing give.
I like the breadth of On Color. It added to my understanding of color and stimulated me to think about color in new ways. It is a rich and useful read.
On Color,Yale University Press