Colour Feast continues: Green man-made and natural Crystals

It is time to continue the colour series: GREEN. I want you to drool over these lovely green colours that nature has created in crystals and also some man-made crystals which can be equally inspirational. These green shades make me want to take my brushes immediately and go to the easel to create something with these shades or imagine a lake, hidden deep in the forests, with waters just as these greens - wouldn't it be devine to dive into those?

Spring has arrived and the Colours come back...

These are pics I shot yesterday and today. Spring has finally arrived and with it some lovely colours....

~

Rooms in Green

Do you know what a green room is? No - it is not a room simply designed with green wallpaper or a green carpet, with a sofa in green and with green cushions. No - a green room has an entirely different meaning:

"In British English and American English show business lexicon, the green room is that space in a theatre, a studio, or a similar venue, which accommodates performers or speakers not yet required on stage. The green room functions as a waiting room, or as a touch-up lounge so that a performer need not return to wardrobe or to the dressing room, while remaining immediately available for a call to the stage. The origin of the term is often attributed to such an area historically being painted green, yet the modern "green room" is often not green at all.The specific origin of the term is lost to history, which has led to many imaginative theories and claims. One story is that London's Blackfriars Theatre (1599) included a room behind the scenes; this room happened to be painted green; here the actors waited to go on stage; and it was called "the green room." Some English theatres contained several green rooms, each ranked according to the status and the salary of the actor: one could be fined for using a green room above one's station


In addition to the preceding explanations, the term green room has also been attributed to numerous alternative folk etymologies, including the following" (I picked only a few which I found to be especially funny) (from Wikipedia):

• Many actors experience nervous anxiety before a performance and one of the symptoms of nervousness is nausea. As a person who feels neauseous is often said to look "green", so the "Green Room" is the place where the nervous actors wait...

• Some studies state that the green room was originally called the retaining room. The ensemble of a production would wait there for their appearance onstage, listening to the performance of the principal actors and critiquing their acting. When made aware of this practice, the leads began to call the retaining room the green room, mocking the (green) envy of these actors.

• According to one theory, long before modern makeup was invented the actors had to apply makeup before a show and allow it to set up or cure before performing. Until the makeup was cured, it was green and people were advised to sit quietly in the green room until such time as the makeup was stable enough for performing. Uncured makeup is gone, but the green room lives on.

• In Shakespearean theatre actors would prepare for their performances in a room filled with plants and shrubs. It was believed that the moisture in the topiary was beneficial to the actors' voices. Thus the green room may refer to the green plants in this stage preparation area.

• In English theatres, a green floor-cloth was traditionally spread on the stage for tragedies. During the Restoration, when virtually all performances were comedies, the green floor-cloth for tragedies was stored in the actors' waiting room and used to deaden their footsteps so the sound of pacing actors would not disturb the performance. As tragedies were rarely performed, the green floor cloth became a routine fixture of the actors' lounge and the room became known as the green room.

• In some theatre companies, the term green room also refers to the director's critique session held after a rehearsal or performance, since it is often held in the green room. This session is used for a pep talk, bonding among actors, and/or warmup exercises.

• Green room is also a term for a room where plants are grown as the windows are made of glass, making it a perfect habitat for plants.

• In the White House, the Green Room is one of three state parlors located on the state floor, it is traditionally decorated in green. (from Wikipedia)

But there are of course also green rooms which ARE designed in green shades and hues. Amazingly quite a lot of them although there hasn't been a single green hue nominated by Pantone since 2000 as colour of the year.

The choices from the fashion reports were different. There you could find a "vibrant green" and "kelp", the latter being rather a "khaki" green in the spring report of 2005. In the spring report of 2006 there was a "lily green" in their palette, in the fall report of 2007 appeared 2 green hues again: a "shale green" and a "green moss". In the spring report of 2008 appeared a "golden olive" and a "daiquiri green". In the fall report of 2008 Pantone said about "glady shade" that it delivererd a "natural elegance to the fall palette. Taking green in an interesting direction with its true green characteristics, this hue is a departure from greens of seasons past, which have had distinctively yellow undertones." In 2009 we suddenly had 3 green hues: "lucite green", "dark citron" and "vibrant green" again. This year's green hues are "peapod" for spring and "cedar" for fall.

So these are a lot of green hues for fashion. And there are a lot for room decorating which was really a surprise for me as I thought that green is not really a very common colour for interior design. But I was wrong.
The various examples of interior design with green are not meant completely serious - so please consider this collection with a little tongue-in-cheek...

What I miss most: the Colour Green

It is so much fun to research about colours - so what to choose next? I thought about what I would like to see at the moment i.e. what I miss most in winter times such as these when I look outside the window: there is no green, green, GREEEEEN. I miss green.

The word green is closely related to the Old English verb growan, “to grow”. It is used to describe plants or the ocean. So the colour green is the colour of life, the colour of the plants and of springtime and as such it symbolizes hope and immortality. In China the colour green
represents the female Yin, the passive, receiving principle.

"The color green is the color of balance and harmony. From a color psychology perspective, it is the great balancer of the heart and the emotions, creating equilibrium between the head and the heart.
From a meaning of colors perspective, green is also the color of growth, the color of spring, of renewal and rebirth. It renews and restores depleted energy. It is the sanctuary away from the stresses of modern living, restoring us back to a sense of well being. This is why there is so much of this relaxing color on the earth, and why we need to keep it that way.
The color green is an emotionally positive color, giving us the ability to love and nurture ourselves and others unconditionally.

Green promotes a love of nature, and a love of family, friends, pets and the home. It is the color of the garden lover, the home lover and the good host.

Green is the color of prosperity and abundance, of finance and material wealth. It relates to the business world, to real estate and property. Prosperity gives a feeling of safety to green." (from Color Psychology).

But there are also negative aspects of the colour green such as:
the color green can be possessive and materialistic. Think of the common phrase "s/he was green with envy - a very negative reaction to the color green. Green is a color that apparently encourages us to want to own things, to collect and possess. It stands for money. Sometimes it can also describe someone who is inexperienced, jealous, or sick. One of my art works is a silk scroll that depicts one of the 7 deadly sins: it is called Greed

"Greed"

49" x 29", silk scroll

©Petra Voegtle

An art critic once described the background of this silk scroll so aptly as "sickly green" which expressed exactly what I intented.Green encourages materialism.

On the other side the phrase "we go green"´is related to the new environmental understanding and means something completely different. "Green energy", "green agriculture", "green production" etc. mean something completely different and is rather directed to less spending and wasting. So the colour green apparently seems to inhabit some paradoxa.

Green is a combination of yellow and blue, and thus the color green encompasses the mental clarity and optimism of yellow with the emotional calm and insight of blue, inspiring hope and a generosity of spirit not available from other colors.So green is considered to be rather a positive colour than negative.

What is really interesting is, how other languages treat the colour green. They simply have no definition or word for it:

"Quite a number of languages from countries, mostly in Africa, do not distinguish blue from black, while there are a handful of languages that do not distinguish blue from black but have a separate term for green. Also, some languages treat light (often greenish) blue and dark blue as separate colours, rather than different variations of blue, while English does not.

According to Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's 1969 study Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, distinct terms for brown, purple, pink, orange and grey will not emerge in a language until the language has made a distinction between green and blue. In their account of the development of colour terms the first terms to emerge are those for white/black (or light/dark), red and green/yellow.
Many languages do not have separate terms for blue and green, instead using a cover term for both (when the issue is discussed in linguistics, this cover term is sometimes called grue in English). For example, in Vietnamese both tree leaves and the sky are xanh (to distinguish, one may use xanh lá cây "leaf grue" for green and xanh dươngเขียว (khiaw) means green except when referring to the sky or the sea, when it means blue; เขียวชอุ่ม (khiaw cha-um), เขียวขจีเขียวแปร๊ด (khiaw praed) have all meant either intense blue or garish green.

Chinese has a word (qīng) that can refer to both, though it also has separate words for blue (lán) and green (lǜ). The Korean word (pureuda) can mean either green or blue. In Japanese, the word for blue (ao) is often used for colors that English speakers would refer to as green, such as the color of a traffic signal meaning "go". Some Nguni languages of southern Africa, including Tswana utilize the same word for blue and green. In traditional Welsh (and related Celtic languages), glas could refer to blue but also to certain shades of green and grey; however, modern Welsh is restricting glas to blue and using gwyrdd for green and llwyd for grey. Similarly, in Irish, glas can mean various shades of green and grey (like the sea), while liath is grey proper (like a horse). In Old Norse the word blå was also used to describe black (and the common word for people of African descent was thus blåmenn 'blue/black men'). In Swedish, blå, the modern word for blue, was used this way until the early 20th century." (after Wikipedia) "ocean grue" for blue). In the Thai language, (khiaw khachi), and

So no matter what you call green who could deny that the following greens (in our language) are reviving for the eye and soothe our soul?

Some more Colours to drool over

I thought before I continue my detailed series about various colours I give you some more to drool over - later in the year when then plants and the flowers are all out it is sooooooooooo ordinary -