ED
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ECAUSE
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EJECTS
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COLOUR HAS ALWAYS INTRIGUED ME AND IN RESEARCHING THIS book I found great delight in learning about colour, what it actually is and how it comes about. We need to sketch in some simple physics in order to illuminate this. Colour is not a cloak worn by an object; each colour is generated and shows the vulnerability of an object: its Being-Seen-ness. One of the great illusions of human vision is that there is stillness, yet what seems still to our eyes is in fact never still. The whole physical world is in a state of permanent vibration and change. Each object is constantly astir. The physical world is an electromagnetic field. Each thing is deftly aflow in the play of energy, namely, electromagnetic waves. The waves flow in different frequencies. Our eyes only pick up a small section of this vibrating wave-world: this is what we call visible light. What we see, we see in light; yet what we see is always partial, a selection from the full spectrum of what is there but not visible to us. There is a real world of invisible light here around us but we cannot see it. Though we feel at home and sure in the visible world, it is in truth a limited place. Visible light comprises only one-tenth of the whole light spectrum. When we see the whole flow of visible light together, it is white.
Different colours arise when certain wavelengths are filleted from the spectrum. Colour is always the result of a subtraction from whiteness and not the singular, lonely choice of outer garment by an object. Each object is already pulsing to a certain frequency and the hunger or generosity of this frequency determines how much colour an object absorbs. Each bird, stone, tree, wave and face is sistered to sunlight in an individual way. Each thing comes alive in the sun: how a stone vibrates to the sun is how it absorbs the light’s energy at that frequency and the rhythm of the frequency is the key to its colour. This frequency fillets out a specific colour from the spectrum of light and this then becomes the colour of the object. For centuries a granite rock might lie in the corner of a field, perfectly still, dressed in sure colour – this is what the eye sees, yet what the eye cannot see are the secret vibrations and continuous inner change that underlie and indeed create this still, coloured image. Colour is never dead or neutraclass="underline" it issues from individual, secret frequencies.
What is the spectrum of colour? It is the reservoir, the broad band of colour that is always present. But the human eye can never behold the whole visual/non-visual range of that spectrum. In this sense, each object is an abbreviation: its individual frequency absorbs one colour from the spectrum, while the other colours are still present but remain unseen. This is why there is transparency. When the rays of light do not correspond with the individual pulse of an object, the object reflects the light. But we never actually notice or see the light rays which pass through. It is the light rays which the object resists and will not let in that return and reach our eyes. The very thereness of a flower or a stone is an act of resistance to light, and colour is the fruit of this resistance. The colours we cannot see are the ones the object absorbs. The colour it rejects is, ironically, the one in which we see it dressed. For instance, a rose absorbs yellow and blue, and it rejects red. So we see a rose as red. A daffodil absorbs blue and red, but rejects yellow and yet it is this yellow we see.
While the object resists the light, the object is also penetrated by the light. The activity that gives an object its colour has all the play and excitement of lovemaking. Yet much remains hidden in the solitude of the object where the unseen colours continue to dwell. If an object could get up and look at itself in a mirror, it would undoubtedly be surprised at its public countenance. In all probability this is not how it would see itself; the mirror would offer no glimpse of the inner colours which have no need of the outside eye: they continue to live concealed within the object.
T
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S THE
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ESTINATION OF
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OLOUR
WHEN WE COME TO GLIMPSE HOW COLOUR ARISES, WE BEGIN TO understand what a rich symbolic world colour suggests. Colour is not simply a surface pigment or covering. The very heart of an object glows through its colour, and colour is always reaching towards us. Without our eyes there is no colour. All colour is colour reflected from an object towards us and the eye is the secret destination of colour. What happens between the granite stone and the sun is read by the brain and the eye as colour. We could say, then, that it belongs to the psychic grandeur of the human heart, that it is fashioned to behold the world in the vitality, warmth and wonder of colour. We are creatures fashioned to behold colour because the soul loves beauty. Plato stated this elegantly in the Phaedrus. He suggests that our present love of beauty is an awakened echo of our earlier life in the eternal world. There we knew beauty because we lived in her grace: ‘But of beauty, I repeat again that we saw her there shining in company with the celestial forms; and coming to earth we find her here too, shining in clearness through the clearest aperture of sense . . . But this is the privilege of beauty, that being the loveliest she is also the most palpable to sight.’
The beauty of colour is an intricate play of presence and absence. As we have seen, a colour is never alone, for each reflected colour arises through the interplay of other hidden colours which we do not see. After the perished paleness of winter, the sight of a field of new spring grass is pleasing in its hope and urgency. Yet such a field of breathing greenness is the achievement of chlorophyll, which has breathed in the red and blue of the sunlight to reflect and release green. Colour is always a dance where the vital partners are invisible. Indeed one could legitimately speak of the music of colour. A soprano can break a wine glass if her note happens to hit the natural vibrational note of the glass and, in a sense, this is the way that colour too is released. When a ray of light hits the natural vibrational note of an object, it alters the vibration; it becomes absorbed itself in this alteration and what is reflected outwards is the object’s colour. The Impressionist movement, for instance, was totally immersed in the attempt to capture these vibrations of colour.
From another perspective, we could say that the colour we perceive is the remains of the other colours which have been absorbed. The colour that gleams towards us lives from its invisible ghosts, the colours buried deep in the seen object. When we behold the magnificent and vanishing raiment of autumn colour, we are seeing a double valediction, the inner leave-taking of the hidden companion colours without which the outer autumn colours could never have attained visibility. Language is weak in bringing the visual to expression. The French philosopher Derrida said that colour has not yet been named. All colour has its origin in the brightness of white.
W
HITE
: W
OMB OF
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OLOUR
For Lima has taken the white veil . . . this whiteness keeps her
ruins for ever new.
HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby Dick
EACH COLOUR EVOKES ITS OWN WORLD OF FEELING AND association. White is associated with purity and innocence. Snow turns the earth white in a wondrous transformation. Snow does what the night does: it absolves the world of colour. Whereas the night gives black absolution, the snow gives white absolution. The totality and certainty of white in a landscape under snow must cause the night some unease!
Several years ago in Cape Town, a friend and I had the opportunity of visiting Robben Island, the prison where Nelson Mandela and his friends were incarcerated for twenty-eight years. We also visited the lime mines on the island where they slaved by day. Imagine the searing exposure of their skin to the relentless bite of the lime. When the fierce African sun turned the lime into blinding whiteness, how their eyesight was tormented and seared. One exprisoner, now a tour guide, told us that after the long working day – the lime on their skin, the salt of their sweat and the salt of their tears – they were often forced to have hot showers in salt water. It must have seemed to them that not only their white oppressors but the very whiteness of nature itself was rising up against their colour.