While music and its voices sound out the depths of silence and delight our listening, colour calls forth the secrets of darkness and light to bring joy to the eye.
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Most people don’t look . . .
The gaze that pierces – few have it –
What does the gaze pierce?
The question mark.
HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON
COLOUR IS THE LANGUAGE OF LIGHT; IT ADORNS THE EARTH with beauty. Through colour light brings its passion, kindness and imagination to all things: pink to granite, green to leaves, blue to ocean, yellow to dawn. Light is not simply a functional brightness that clears space for visibility. Perhaps of all the elements, light has the most refined imagination; it is never merely a medium. Light is the greatest unnoticed force of transfiguration in the world: it literally alters everything it touches and through colour dresses nature to delight, befriend, inspire and shelter us. The miracle of colour is a testament to the diverse, precise and ever surprising beauty of the primal imagination. The intense passion of the first artist glows forth in the rich colours of creation. In this sense, colour is the visual Eucharist of things. In a world without colour, it would be impossible to imagine beauty; for colour and beauty are sisters. As Goethe said: the eye needs colour as much as it needs light.
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MY EARLIEST MEMORIES ARE OF THE LANDSCAPE OF THE BURREN IN the West of Ireland. The Burren is an ancient kingdom of limestone sculptures carved slowly by rain, wind and time. Limestone is a living stone. Everywhere light conspires to invest these stone shapes with nuance. When rain comes, the whole stonescape turns blue-black. Rain has artistic permission here that it could enjoy in no other landscape. Mostly invisible and quickly absorbed by the earth, rain achieves powerful visibility on the vast limestone pavements. Like an artist who has fallen into despair, it drenches the grey stone with gleaming black. Everywhere the stone drinks in blackness as though it secretly corresponded to its inner mind. Then the rain ceases and the sun returns; the light effects a complete transfiguration. Gradually the dark dries off and the stonescape literally resurrects, glistening with washed whiteness, a reminder that this stone world once lived on the ocean floor.
Winter always makes the Burren more severe. The ameliorating green of trees and grasses diminishes in cold paleness. As the grip of winter loosens, the landscape gradually returns from bleakness to the welcome of exotic spring flowers which have an unexpected home here. The Burren is famous for its rare alpine and arctic flora and gradually amidst the grey stonescape, these delicate flowers creep forth in subtle sacraments of colour. Profusions of gentian surface like blue stars, white and purple orchids rise to offer their quiet grandeur to view, mountain avens with their white and yellow countenances make the stone seem kind. In crowds the harebells test their deft blueness against the breeze. Rich orange, yellow lichens come to cover the white limestone bearing beautiful names like Sea Ivory, Tar Lichen, Orange Sea Lichen and Common Orange Lichen. And perhaps most striking of all, the Bloody Cranesbill rises in its delicate crimson petals and white heart through the scailps (crevices) in the limestone.
As a child I often watched a local blacksmith at work. He would place the silver horseshoes into a black, coal-dust fire to redden them. Under the fierce breath of the bellows the mound of black dust was an instant furnace of redness. Perhaps, similarly the very breath of life breathes into things until their individual colours flame. Such is the generosity of air, self-effacing and unseen it asks nothing of the eye, yet it offers life to the invisible fields where light can unfold its scriptures of colour. We dwell between the air and the earth, guests of that middle kingdom where light and colour embrace.
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ONCE WHILE TRAVELLING IN CHINA I WAS ON MY WAY TO Shanghai Airport. It was a dull morning. The road, suburbs and landscape were grey and colourless. Even the track and trek of commuters seemed like some underworld parade. It began to rain in slanted layers. Then I noticed a cyclist coming towards me. Attached to the back of his bicycle was a large basket piled high with balls of wool in every colour you could imagine. This determined cyclist was like a traveller from another world who transfigured the whole grey suburban landscape with his gentle cargo of blues, yellows, greens, indigos, oranges, purples and ochres.
The presence and experience of colour is at the very heart of human life. In a sense, we are created for a life full of colour. It is no accident that we abandon the world when the colours vanish and the reign of darkness commences. Night is the land where all the outer colours sleep. We awaken and return to the world when the colours return at dawn. There is a beautiful word in Irish for this: luisne – the first blush of light before dawn breaks. Gradually, the coloured horizon of dawn gives way to daylight.
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WE TAKE DAYLIGHT FOR GRANTED. YET DAYLIGHT IS NOT SIMPLY there; it is an event, a smooth all-pervasive happening. Daylight is created light, a light woven seamlessly from a whole series of colours. The unnoticed miracle of everyday light is exposed in the rainbow, an apparition that is both illusory and tenuous. Conamara is a landscape beloved of rainbows. Between the rich light and the frequent rains, rainbows love to appear here. Every rainbow is a revelation: the optic through water drops that separates seamless daylight to reveal and display the secret inlay of colours that dwell at the heart of ordinary light.
In a sense, one could speak of the secret life of colour. Despite its outward beckoning, like true beauty, colour is immensely hesitant in giving away its secrets. Painters learn to respect the hesitancy of colour and endeavour to refine their skill to become worthy of its revelations. A painter learns the language of colour slowly. As in learning any language, you struggle for a long time outside the language. There is a willed deliberateness to how you sequence the strange words to make a sentence. Then one day the language lets you in to where the words dance to your thoughts with ease and fluency. Perhaps for a painter, too, there is a day when colour lets him in, when his palette sings with synergy and delight. For the artist Paul Klee that day happened during a trip to Tunisia in 1914. He wrote: ‘Colour possesses me. I don’t have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour. Colour and I are one. I am a painter.’
The attempt to understand and explain colour has always fascinated the human mind. In classical times Aristotle’s theory held that colour belonged objectively to things. This understanding held sway until the seventeenth century. One day in his room, a young Isaac Newton was experimenting with light. He placed a prism against the light ray coming through his window and noticed how the prism split the white light into its constituent colours. The genius of his intuition inspired him to place a second prism upside down in the path of the diverse colours. In that moment the colours coalesced again into a seamless white light. Newton concluded that colour is generated by subjective perception and vision. For Aristotle, light awakened colour. For the medieval mind, light was the vehicle of colour. But for Newton light is colour.
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