Review: Andrew Hui on the Art of Color

An artist recreates the history of color from its natural sources

Socotra is an island situated between the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Aden, 250 miles off Yemen. The landscape is a geologist’s dream. In its ancient crystalline rocks, limestone plateaus, and a honeycomb of caves, some of the world’s most stunning organisms make their home: a rare warbler, the loggerhead turtle, frankincense and myrrh trees, and perhaps its most prominent species, the dragon’s blood tree (Dracaena cinnabari). The tree is crowned by a half-domed canopy of slender leaves, resembling a giant green mushroom. It can grow for three hundred years or more. If you make a gash in the trunk, it seems to bleed, oozing a deep red resin long prized as pigment and medicine.

Dragon’s blood from Socotra, as Nabil Ali tells us in his marvelous Gold from Newton’s Apple Tree, was already well known in Roman antiquity. The anonymous Circumnavigation of the Red Sea records that the island is “barren and also damp, with rivers, crocodiles, a great many vipers, and huge lizards, so huge that people eat the flesh and melt down the fat to use in place of oil.” This dragon’s blood was called Indian cinnabar. Painters used cinnabar for opulent murals; doctors used it to treat ailments of the eye. For his part, Pliny claimed in the Natural History that dragon’s blood is derived from “the gore of a dragon crushed beneath the weight of dying elephants, the blood of both beasts mingled together.”