The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Nature’s Palette: A Color Reference System from the Natural World by Patrick Baty

Episode Date: June 25, 2021

Nature’s Palette: A Color Reference System from the Natural World by Patrick Baty A gorgeous expanded edition of Werner's Nomenclature of Colours, a landmark reference book on color and its origins in nature First published in 1814, Werner's Nomenclature of Colours is a taxonomically organized guide to color in the natural world. Compiled by German geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner, the book was expanded and enhanced in 1821 by Patrick Syme, who added color swatches and further color descriptions, bringing the total number of classified hues to 110. The resulting resource has been invaluable not only to artists and designers but also to zoologists, botanists, mineralogists, anatomists, and explorers, including Charles Darwin on the famous voyage of the Beagle. Nature's Palette makes this remarkable volume available to today's readers, and is now fully enhanced with new illustrations of all the animals, plants, and minerals Werner referenced alongside each color swatch. Readers can see "tile red" in a piece of porcelain jasper, the breast of a cock bullfinch, or a Shrubby Pimpernel. They can admire "Berlin blue" on a piece of sapphire, the Hepatica flower, or the wing feathers of a jay. Interspersed throughout the book are lavish feature pages displaying cases of taxidermy, eggs, shells, feathers, minerals, and butterflies, with individual specimens cross-referenced to the core catalog. Featuring contributions by leading natural history experts along with more than 1,000 color illustrations and eight gatefolds, Nature's Palette is the ideal illustrated reference volume for visual artists, naturalists, and anyone who is captivated by color.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here in the integrate podcast we certainly appreciate you tuning in did you hear about our youtube channel we got this youtube channel thing everyone that's got one now is all the kids. It's the latest thing. It's one of the

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is on the show and he's gonna be talking about some interesting stuff his name is patrick beatty and he has written a book that has just recently come out in may here you can take and check it out may 18th 2021 nature's palette a color reference systems from the natural world color reference system from the natural world it's available now you can take and get it and this episode is brought to you by a sponsor ifi-audio.com and their micro idst signature it's a top-of-the-range desktop transportable DAC and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones. It has two Brown-Burr DAC chips in it and will decode high-res audio and MQA files. We're using it in the studio right now. I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer

and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion, and hiss from your listening experience. Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com. And it's a gorgeous expanded edition of Werner's Nomenclature of Colors, a landmark reference book on color and its origins in nature. And we invited him to come on the show to tell us more about the book so that we can find out about it. Let's get a talk about what Patrick is.

He is interested in the decoration of historic buildings. In the U.S., he has been called the Columbo of color for his forensic work on uncovering the secrets of a structure through forensic analysis of the paint layers. In the U.K., he has worked on hundreds of palaces, castles, country houses, cathedrals, churches, and bridges, as well as many private houses he's also worked in the u.s he lectures on a variety of subjects as well as numerous articles he has published two books the anatomy of color and nature's palette him and his wife run the family business papers and paints in london and welcome the show patrick how are you i'm very well indeed

chris thank you very much indeed for inviting me to talk. Yes, thanks for coming. And Patrick, give us your plugs, your dot coms on the internet where people can look you up and find out more about you. I have a website, which is Patrick Beatty. That's Patrick Beatty dot co dot UK. That's my personal website. The shop has a website, which is papersandpaints.com. And I'm on Instagram and Twitter and all that sort of thing. So what motivated you on to write this

book? I had, as you said, I'd written the first book, Anatomy of Color. And one of the aspects that I was looking at was the way that colour language developed and how somebody could describe a colour to somebody else and have a reasonable idea that the other person understood what they were talking about. So I was particularly interested in colour language. One of the small works that I came across when I was researching the first book was a little volume of 110 hand-painted colours. And this was originally produced in 1814 by a Scotsman, by a flower painter of yours. And

he called his book Werner's Nomenclature of Colour. Now, when I wrote the first book, I didn't actually pursue that. I didn't actually set out to find out who Mr. Werner was. I just took the book for what it was and I worked forward. I sought out the influence that book had and I managed to trace a line, a complete line from 1814 through to paint colours being used in England in the 1950s, 1960s even. It went through many iterations from colours used by botanists to describe the colour of flowers, for example, colours used in the 20th century, would you believe, for camouflage purposes,

colours used for painting primary schools in the 1950s, so all sorts of things, which ultimately started off with this little volume produced by a Scots flower painter. And my publisher, Thames & Hudson in the UK and Princeton University Press in the US, seemingly were interested in this little book and said, look, can you tell us a bit more about Werner? Who was Werner? And I thought, a very good question. I don't know. Actually, I did. I knew he was a German mineralogist.

I didn't quite know how significant he was. And I set out at fairly short notice to research Mr. Werner and was intrigued. And after about just under 100 different volumes in different languages that I had to read in primary sources, I managed to chart the progress from the work produced by a young mineralogist in 1774, Abraham Werner, to ultimately to this Scottish house, sorry, I keep on saying house, Scottish flower painter. And I became, because actually, to be frank, it took me out of

my area, took me out of my comfort zone. I'm involved, as you've said, quite likely with architecture, with houses, colours used in buildings. I didn't initially know that much about colour used in the natural world. And so I was introduced very much to colours used to describe minerals, to describe the plumage of birds, to describe the fur of animals and all that sort of thing. There you go. There you go. So why are books like this important? And we're talking about just colors. I know women see in so many different colors and stuff. Guys were just like, give me blue and red. Why are books like this really important?

In the grand scheme of things, I'm not pretending to myself that this book is huge. However, I underline, I was very gratified when the reader's report, I think they call it, from Princeton University Press came through. Obviously, before any publisher puts their money down on a new book, they try and assess the market. And they obviously sent the draft of this book off to some boffin, somebody, somewhere, who came to some very interesting conclusions. And he said, this aspect of the history of science has never been touched before, to his knowledge, it's completely fresh, no one knows anything about it, no one has considered it before in any great depth and so he said from that point of view it is worthy of publishing because it's making a breakthrough

but also and this is where the publishers come into the before they have managed to make it a particularly attractive volume a huge volume with about a thousand illustrations, which all relate to this tiny little book, which came out, say, originally in 1814. So is the book at the time pretty pioneering, the book that was published? This little book, when it first came out, was completely pioneering because until then, no one really had set out to produce a little volume of colours, a little field book, if you like, a pocketbook, something that a naturalist could take with them on an expedition and then, you know, bring out at the relevant time to describe what he or she was looking at. So it was completely

new. And one of the things that Patrick Syne, in fact, was the name of this Scots flower painter, Patrick Syne. One of the things that he did was actually to refer back to this German volume of 40 years previously in 1774. And he had not only produced little colour samples, but in a sort of tabular fashion, he had listed those creatures in the animal and plants and things in the botanical world, and then minerals in that side of life. So he was actually showing the reader where they could see these colors. Oh, that's pretty interesting. There's so many different colors. How many different colors are there in the world? Variations of colors? Does anybody have a count on that?

No, and I don't think there's any point. One of those things you just spin around in a circle. Yeah. It's like I go to the paint place and I'm just like, whoa. But I think this is important and to categorize these things. What other aspects of the book are going to surprise people or stick out to readers? I've been intrigued by the response that the people have come up with on seeing the book, because in fact, it came out in England, I think, pretty well a month before the US.

And so I've had a bit more feedback. The first thing is, it seems to tick all the boxes from the point of view of selling books. It's relatively, I think it's reasonably priced. It's very colourful it's very attractive it's the sort of book that you can dip into in fact you'd be quite honestly you'd be a lunatic to try and sit and read it cover to cover because it is quite dense but the chunks of fact are broken up in a most attractive way using contemporary illustrations. So illustrations from the early 19th century, that kind of thing. And then what the publishers have done this time round is fill in the gaps

that Patrick signed back in 1814 had left because his book isn't complete. There are sections where he doesn't offer an animal equivalent of a particular colour or that kind of thing. It's quite a hefty volume. It'll make a very good doorstop, quite honestly. I could give to my mother-in-law and she'd be delighted. In fact, I did do that a couple of weeks ago. I could give it to a granddaughter and something she would grow into. So I think it ticks boxes. And also it's the kind of book that makes you feel intelligent even if you don't read it um just think by owning it that by a process of osmosis

you're going to pick up the facts i'm going to i'm going to buy one just so i can have one i'm going to carry it everywhere and people are going to go man he's really into fashion and color you'll need a hefty shoulder bag if you carry it there you go why are colors important to the human experience i why are they important to you or why would you say they're important to the human experience all these variations of color bear in mind you're talking to somebody who for the last 40 years has been working with color and so i would like to think that my sort of color faculties are reasonably well developed and color is one of those things uh it's one of those things frankly and I'm an ex-soldier so I tell you that because then you'll understand what

I'm just about to say where I feel a bit uncomfortable waxing lyrical about sort of things that are airy and vague and abstract like colour but colour is important to me the colour of the shirt I put on that sort of thing the color of the shirt I put on, that sort of thing, the color of the tie I wear when I do wear a tie and that kind of thing. I think it's a personal thing. A lot of people aren't taught about color.

They don't pick up any particular knowledge about color. But once you've been working with it, as long as I have, it is, your brain is rejigged and you tune in. And it's therefore, I find it important. Do colors tell a better story of our lives and riches? I've had people come to my office and they're like, I can't stand the paint on your walls. And I need to be able to feel better with the better color of paint that appeals to me, my psyche or something.

And I've just been like, okay. And I know people are really into different colors of paint so does it just help tell a better story of our lives or maybe make us feel more comfortable or it does a number of things for example you talk about people coming into your office or whatever certainly i think we we all know that if you're trying to sell an apartment or a house it's sensible to think in terms of the sort of general taste if there can be such a thing there's no point having something that's really in your face or too specific because it might actually put people off so one needs to go for the lowest common denominator which is a bit negative but that's the fact but I think colour does tell quite a lot about one. For example, in this country at the moment, we're just coming to the end of a fashion for grey externally on front doors, even on windows,

and that sort of thing. There seems to be this rather anonymous, neutral, uninspired taste for grey. And I wonder how much of that is because people actually don't know. They aren't brave enough to make their own statements. So they're doing what other people do in a rather, I think, negative fashion. And then when one walks around the street, say in London, or I dare say in various cities, towns in the US, when I see a particular colour on a front door or whatever, I will, it'll click and I'll log on to that. And I'll think that's nice. That's really good. So we respond in a different way.

I think a lot of it is subliminal. We don't know perhaps what we're looking at or why we like it. We might be making an association with something perhaps. And then there's other colours that corporate colours that companies, businesses use. And sometimes they seem to use a colour that actually isn't very nice. But my goodness, it's colours recognised.

We have a bank in this country called Barclays Bank. And they have their corporate colour is a sort of turquoise, bluey green. I don't like it. But if I see out of the corner of my eye a sign with that colour on, I immediately know it's Barclays Bank. So it works. It's like the old McDonald's red used to, fortunately, they've now moved away from red, at least in this country,

to a rather subtle green in many locations. But McDonald's hamburgers red that one used to see everywhere. So that's a sort of color and identity which is another aspect that i'm quite interested in ah and it says here it's available it's invaluable not only to artists and designers but to zoologists botanists mineralogists anatomists and explorers there's a section in the book i didn't write the whole book i must point out i was helped hugely by four very able individuals, experts in their individual fields, mineralogy, anatomy, botany,

ornithology. And I hadn't actually fully appreciated that colour is used very often by doctors, by physicians, to basically to tell what they're looking at. They can see from the colour of someone's eyes, perhaps the yellowness of their eyes or whatever, that they might have a liver complaint. So it can be used in all sorts of seemingly obscure ways. Wow. And it has over a thousand color illustrations and eight gatefolds. The ideal illustrator reference volume for visual artists, naturalists,

and anyone who's captivated by color. Yeah, if you're definitely looking to redo your kitchen there is the right color intriguingly the publishers didn't keep this part of my text oh but the last use that i could uh see that had been made of this wonderful little volume of 1814 was by the American author Patricia Highsmith now without being too controversial or lewd or whatever you like to call it she used it or wrong not she but her lover at the time a woman called Mary Ronan who was a graphic designer in New York in the advertising business in the 50s 60s she referred to Patricia Highsmith's body by using vernis and mengrature of colour.

So she described her hair as being, I think, was it scotch blue or something like that? I can't remember exactly. And the colour of her lips, without lipstick, she described using vernis and mengrature, and the colour of her skin, which is celandine green, for example. So that's one of the more obscure

uses of it being put to use. If we can be more descriptive, we can tell better stories, I think, too, as well. And the world is a visual place. So this is interesting, the Columbo of color. Tell us a little bit about this forensic work that you've done. Well, I usually start off one of the talks I give on what I do by telling people that in the United Kingdom, I'm known often by some people, at least as the paint detective, and in the US as the Columbo of colour. And then I point out, obviously, as you appreciate,

that's colour without the U, colour, however you spell it. And that refers to my work as a forensic analyst. That sounds a bit pompous, and I don't mean to be, but what I do is I work, I specialise in historic buildings, and I take numerous tiny little core samples from the painted surfaces and examine them under the microscope. And rather like some sort of crazy jigsaw puzzle, I eventually reassemble them and find out how a room looked over the years,

over the last, say, 300 years, how to change colour. I can also find out, for example, if a door had been inserted into a wall that hadn't been there originally. I had a job some years ago when I was working on a house in the middle of Dartmoor. Dartmoor, I don't know if you know of it, it's only really ever known by people in connection with the prison, the famous convicts prison, and also

the Hound of the Baskervilles, the Sherlock Holmes story. So it's a huge chunk of moorland in southwest England. And I was working on a house in the centre of that, an 18th century house. And I was taking my paint samples and there were two pairs of doors in this house that were really particularly fine. And they didn't appear to be original to the house. And my suspicion was proved, demonstrated, I suppose, when I saw that one of the doors had sun damage on it so rather fine decoration painted decoration and gilding and then the paint on it was rather like the skin on the back of my hands it was all wrinkled as though it had been subjected to the strong sun now in this particular house those doors were nowhere near a window so it was clear

that they'd been moved from somewhere else. And anyway, by a process of elimination, I could eventually prove beyond shadow of a doubt that those two pairs of doors came from a building that had been erected by what we call the Prince Regent, the man who became King George IV in this country in the 1820s. And they'd come from a house that he had built in London 300 miles away so literally just by looking at the layers of paint on a pair of doors I could demonstrate where they came from and prove you know so little things like that I worked on a house with an American connection a house by the Thames in Chelsea in London. And the American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler had lived there for a while.

And also it was the house in which he painted that very famous portrait of his mother. I don't know if you know the one, but his mother's sitting on a chair looking quite severe. And by taking my paint samples from around this house, I could find which room Whistler painted in the 1870s, literally just by looking at the paint layers under the microscope. Wow, that is crazy, man. That is wild. That is wild that you can do all that, man.

So any other aspects we haven't covered about the book and what it's about? No, it's really a companion volume to The Anatomy of Color, which is a very different work from one point of view. The Anatomy of Colour shows colours used in decoration for houses and buildings between 1660 and 1960. to a world that certainly I was unfamiliar with, as I said, in terms of natural sciences. I'm generally happier with buildings, what I understand, but my eyes were opened and I was intrigued by this natural world side of it. It's pretty amazing. And I think it helps us tell better stories, helps us see the world in different light and everything else.

So this has been pretty insightful. Give us your plugs before we go out and where people can look you up on the interwebs. I mean, my name alone, if you, I imagine if you type in my name and paint or, and color spelt either the English or the American way,

you'll get all sorts of things coming out. I think that's probably, I'm not hard to find because there's people like me. There you go. There you go. So it's been wonderful Patrick to have you on the show and learn more about your book, Colors, and everything else. I'm sure everyone that's into colors will definitely be checking it out. Thank you very much for coming by and spending time with us today, sir.

Thank you, Chris. Very good to meet you. There you go. And to my audience, pick up the book. Just came out May 18, 2021, Nature's Palette, a color reference system from the natural world. You want to check that out and Patrick's other book as well. Thanks, Matt, for tuning in. Go to YouTube.com, 4ChessChrisVoss.

Hit that bell notification. Also go to Goodreads.com, 4ChessChrisVoss. You can also go see our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, all those different places, and check them out as well. Thanks, Matt, for tuning in, and we'll see you guys next time.