Word: umber
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...Burnt Umber...
...Afghanistan, maybe somebody should tell the enemy it's time to surrender. The bad guys are still out there, undetectable in the rocky, umber hills of eastern Afghanistan--until they strike, which they do with growing frequency, accuracy and brazenness. These days American forward bases are coming under rocket or mortar fire three times a week on average. Apache pilots sometimes see angry red arcing lines of tracer bullets rising toward their choppers from unseen gunners hidden in Afghanistan's saw-blade ridges. Roads frequented by special forces are often mined with remote-controlled explosives, a new tactic al-Qaeda...
...more subtle symphony in ochre and umber is created by the window of Brown's Custom Shop in Kingsport, Tennessee, photographed in 1985. The wall is brown, the rolls of linoleum on display are lime, orange and teak. But Eggleston's aesthetic also has a puritan streak that goes beyond the garish and distressed to encompass blank white walls and dry grasses...
...Cambridge cobbled streets with sufficiently pneumatic tires may wonder. The retro-bike is a genre of used bike which is turning up with alarming frequency on campus. The most common strain--sorry, retro-bikers, it is becoming common--is the Raleigh frame in a rust-eaten variant of burnt umber, olive, electric blue or the ever-present black. The metallic frame comes over both the front and back wheels half-way and preferably, in the purest strains of retro-bike, has an irregularly shaped casing over the chain. Schwinns are also acceptable models...
There is a small amount of color in these paintings -- generally strokes of earth green and rubbed patches of raw umber -- but the prevalent hue of the gray-to-silver monochrome seems to change from canvas to canvas, emitting different tints of light. Marden scrapes back and sandpapers the canvas, leaving the ghosts of one layer of paint behind the other; this subtlety (the equivalent of the nuances inside the coats of wax in his earlier work) plays off against the roughness of the lines. Sometimes a whole web of dark line gets canceled, whited out, but roughly -- on those...