Aaron Fine’s New Book

Congratulations to our Department Chair, Professor Aaron Fine, for his new book!

Cover of Color Theory

Color Theory Cover

This book discusses color theory from its ancient origins to the present, and provides a fascinating contribution to art theory using one of art’s essential building blocks. Professor Fine discusses aspects of color that are long-recognized as important but by analyzing “colonialist and gendered attitudes, materialist and romanticist perspectives, spiritualist approaches to color, color in the age of reproduction, and modernist and post-modernist color strategies” (from the Amazon description of the text) he provides a new framework that allows the application of color theory to practical applications.  Published by Bloomsbury Press and gorgeously illustrated, you can order direct from the publisher or from your local bookstore or through Amazon. Congratulations, Aaron!

Professor Aaron Fine to Present on Color Theory

The next Faculty Forum event will take place at 7 p.m. Oct. 24 in Baldwin Hall 102

“Dialogues on Color” will be a presentation of Aaron Fine’s work on color theory resulting in a book of that title. This book, an inter-genre mixture of creative nonfiction, fiction and coloring book pages, is available to read free online, or purchase at cost, at www.arenotbooks.com.

Providing an intellectual history of Western attitudes towards color, the organizing aim of the book is to reveal the ways cultural context shapes our theories of color, not excluding those we link to Newton’s work with the prism and think of as objective and universally true.

For this presentation, Fine will host a mixture of activities, mingling his own lecture style with staged readings done by theatre students in the voices of Newton, Goethe, Tom Sawyer and others. There will also be opportunities for the audience to color in their own color theory coloring book pages and to win a drawing for one of five complimentary copies of the book “Dialogues on Color.”

Faculty in New York for Research and Book Signing

Dr. Julia DeLancey’s current research into melancholy in the Italian Renaissance, perhaps a manifestation of what we now call “depression,” led her to research in New York, at the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  She has shared these two images taken during the research trip, funded in part by a fellowship established by former Truman State University president Barbara Dixon.

The New York Public Library, photo courtesy of Julia DeLancey.

Visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art walk past Albrecht Dürer’s Melancholia I, photo courtesy of Julia DeLancey.

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