Re: A New Build Begins

Posted by Charlie43 on
URL: http://riverswest-forums.266.s1.nabble.com/A-New-Build-Begins-tp170p183.html

Mark,

Color --its emotional and intellectual impact, never mind individual preferences and dislikes-- is a hugely complicated subject that the boat-building world has never attempted to deal with, AFAIK, and certainly not to the extent the art world has.  

But color matters, and color isn't “relativistic” in the sense that all choices can be defended or have equal merit, and a more skilled colorist cum experimental psychologist than me can lay out the reasons why we humans can make the cross-cultural, often quite universal, ranking judgments we do about what is 'ugly', or 'beautiful', or something in between.  

I can accept Kyaha's 'orangeness' and work with it. But I know it's not part of my "preferred palette". Also, it needs to be pointed out that figured Khaya, which I wasn't selecting for, but the straighter-grained boards which tend to be blander, could be used very effectively for things like chests of drawers, but not for boats meant to be finished bright. I can't find the photo just now. But some wanna-be boat shop planked and framed a skiff in aromatic cedar that is truly ugly. Their "wood-working" skills were furniture-grade. But the boat is a failure, because they let 'color' get away from them, rather than being able to control it to a balanced, proportioned end.

To choose to build in wood, whether "traditionally" or in more "modern" modes, is both to engage and to challenge what has been done before and makes one subject to the praise or scorn of one's peers who have the earned right to say of completed work, "That's beautiful. That's ugly", and a lot of that judgment depends on how color was selected for and then managed.

The aesthetic judgments that can be made about constructed objects, such as boats, are not idiosyncratic expressions of arbitrary taste (i.e., ...my way vs. your way), but informed evaluations of a designer's or builder's skills. Some people draw bad boats. Some people build bad boats. Some people have no eye for color. In terms of color alone, 'beautiful' doesn't float any better than 'ugly'. But why wouldn't one choose one rather than the other other?  

Charlie