Join professor Jennifer Rhodes CC’00, GSAS’17 for Café Columbia: The Color of Creation— an experiential Core Studio workshop series that employs historical materials and artistic practices to explore the works of the Core Curriculum.

Today, artists and authors have a seemingly endless rainbow of colors at their disposal as they build new worlds, with synthetic pigments available in every imaginable hue. Historically, however, the artist’s toolkit has existed in close dialogue with the natural world, with pigments derived from the earth, mineral, botanical and even animal sources. The availability of any given color to a creator would depend on factors from location to status to wealth.

This workshop will explore the symbolic role of color in the works of Aeschylus, Dante Alighieri and Virginia Woolf. It will then move to a hands-on exploration of the authentic materials available to contemporaneous artists — from Tyrian purple through lapis lazuli and cochineal.

Participants will have the opportunity to work directly with dozens of historical pigments across three painting techniques: fresco, egg tempera and oil. The session’s brief apprenticeship in these techniques will use the works of Michelangelo, Botticelli, Caravaggio and Vanessa Bell as models. No practical art experience is necessary!

Image credit: "Michelangelo, Creation of the Sun, Moon, and Plants (detail), 1511. Cappella Sistina, Vatican."