British artist Stuart Semple says that he “pulled an all-nighter” to create his Yolo paint in a colour that imitates one a group of American scientists claim to have just discovered.
Semple, who previously developed the “flattest, mattest, black acrylic paint in the world”, made the paint to replicate the colour scientists at the University of California recently announced as a new hue that no one had ever seen before.
To find the colour the researchers fired laser pulses into their eyes to stimulate individual cells in their retinas, pushing their perception beyond its natural limits.
This revealed to them a blue-green colour that they named Olo, which was documented in the Science Advances journal earlier this month.
Semple told Dezeen that he “ran into the studio, pulled an all-nighter in the lab and made Yolo” – a paint version of the new colour.
The artist said that he used the spectral information detailed in the scientific paper to understand what he was aiming for before combining pigments with different materials.
Using a spectrometer, an instrument that separates light into colours, Semple measured his progress and added his own fluorescent optical brighteners to the paint to “get into that sweet spot of the colour space”.
“What I got was a very weird kind of glowy teal,” he said. “I also played a lot with the surface texture of the paint to enable time to narrow the bandwidth of the light coming off the paint.”
The artist described Yolo as the closest possible physical emulation of Olo.
“Of course it’s not a patch on having a real laser pushed in your eye,” he acknowledged. “But I’m sure it’s closer to the experience than the digital swatch that the scientists made.”
“I can do more with the chemistry of paint in terms of colour than you can do on a screen or in a photo,” added the artist.
Semple is selling Yolo via his website for £10,000 per 150 millilitres, or £29.99 if you are an artist. This stipulation nods to Semple’s ongoing campaign to democratise colour for struggling creatives, he explained.
“Pretty much everything I do for colour is around making colours accessible and usable for creativity,” said the artist, who previously made his own version of post-war artist Yves Klein’s registered ultramarine blue paint.
“We are still very sadly at a time where artists and creators are being overlooked and I wanted the community to know that I made it for them. It’s my way of making the scales a bit fairer,” continued Semple.
“I’m also hoping to move the discussion about the new colour towards its importance to artists.”
“The scientists are wonderful,” he continued.
“I totally respect what they’ve done, but the aesthetics of their discovery aren’t really on their radar. I reckon in the hands of artists and creators there’s a chance that Yolo can make some really inspiring work.”
Semple is known for his ongoing feud with artist Anish Kapoor, who previously bought the exclusive rights to the Vantablack pigment, said to be the world’s blackest paint. In response to the acquisition, Semple created a shade that he claimed was blacker and made it readily available to everyone except Kapoor.
The photography is courtesy of Stuart Semple.
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