On 17 March 2024, 10am CET, ICA-Belgium celebrated International Colour Day (ICD) with an online event. ICD celebrations aim to develop awareness of the importance of colour phenomena and culture in the broad domains of Art and the Humanities, Science, and Technology. For this occasion, we have invited two guest speakers, each of whom is an expert in colour in their field.

Sit back and enjoy our talks with Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, a German archaeologist, specialising in the colour reconstruction of ancient sculptures, and Stephen Westland, a British colour scientist and a professor of Colour Science and Technology in the School of Design at the University of Leeds.

Watch the full talks.

PIGMENTS ON MARBLE: About the Polychromy of Greek and Roman Ancient Sculptures

The sculptures of the ancient Greeks and Romans were painted. This is not surprising, as in all neighboring cultures, such as the Persian Empire or Egypt, sculpture and architecture were completely unimaginable without color. In the ancient world the pigments and colorants were precious and their extraction and production involved a great technological knowledge. They had been traded over long distances since the 3rd millennium BC.

In ancient times, color was part of the story that each individual sculpture told. The idea that a white marble sculpture corresponds to the highest aesthetic ideal is modern and was represented for the first time ever in the Italian Renaissance. This complete iconic turn happened after a continuous tradition of colored sculpture over 4500 years.
Let’s look together at the traces that help us take a more historically accurate approach to ancient sculpture.

Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann is a German archaeologist. After her doctorate in ancient Greek painting at the Ruhr-University Bochum, she worked as a scientific researcher at the University of Munich (2007-2014). She has taught at the University of Augsburg and, since 2011, the Carl August University in Göttingen. With her husband, archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann, she studies and reconstructs the colours of ancient sculptures. The physical reconstructions they create are painted by her. The reconstructions are part of the travelling exhibition Gods in Colour, presented, until now, in 28 locations around the world (Glyptothek Munich, Liebieghaus Sculpture Collection Frankfurt, the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, the British Museum London, Vatican Museums Rome, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Copenhagen, National Archaeological Museum Athens, Archaeological Museum Istanbul, Fine Arts Museums San Francisco, university museums of Harvard, Oxford, Göttingen, Heidelberg, Tübingen and others). The latest exhibition “Antiquity in Colour” is at the moment on view at the Gallo-Roman Museum in Tongeren, Belgium.

COLOUR NOWCASTING: AI and Sustainability

This presentation will explore colour trends in the context of the fashion and textile industry. The consumption of textiles in the world is unsustainable and is placing unbearable demands on energy and clean water. We can see both over-production and over-consumption. Over-production is leading to dead stock (with unused garments going to landfill) and it is believed that poor choices of colour because of inaccurate colour forecasting may be an issue. At the same time, advances in manufacturing technology are shortening the production cycle which is putting ever-greater pressure on traditional colour forecasting processes. The use of AI to predict colour trends will be explored and the possibility of using AI to predict what colours are trending now – so-called colour nowcasting – will be introduced. Some perspectives on the current situation and possible future of AI will be discussed.

Stephen Westland is a Professor of Colour Science and Technology in the School of Design at the University of Leeds. He researches and teaches in the areas of colour design, colour imaging, colour literacy and machine learning. He is a member of the Colour Literacy Project and co-author of the textbook Universal Principles of Color. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers and received the Davies Medal from the Royal Photographic Society (2008) for his research in colour. He was President of the Society of Dyers and Colourists (2020) and holds several visiting professorships at universities in the UK, USA and China.

https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/design/staff/516/professor-stephen-westland