On Color

A conversation with David Scott Kastan:

How did you get interested in color?

I have always been deeply affected by the colors around me. I was a little boy in Arizona, and those desert colors impressed themselves upon me. I still love them. But I love color in a way that is different from, say, how I love Shakespeare. It is something physical. Maybe because of that, I was eager to see if I could find ways to write about color. Colors seem to defy language, and yet of course they are inextricably implicated in it. I wanted to find some of the places where they intersect, as well as where they resist each other.

What was the most surprising thing you learned while writing On Color?

Probably that there was no word for “orange” in any European language until oranges were imported from India. It isn’t that no one saw the color; they just didn’t have that name for it.

What was the most unsettling thing you learned?

I suppose it was discovering how the remarkably inexact metaphors of color that we use for race came about and shaped—and continue to shape—our social lives.

Who was the biggest influence upon the book?

Van Gogh—his paintings, of course, but maybe even more so his amazing letters, written often to his brother, as he tries to figure out how to use color and eventually discovers that color is actually what he is painting, rather than something he is using to paint other things.