In 1215 Pope Innocent III had declared that male and female Jews should wear yellow badges.
W
ILD
D
ELIGHT IN
Y
ELLOW
I went and sat in front of Turner for hours and I realized
something profound – that the vanishing point in the work
does not vanish so that you have the feeling that love, truth and
beauty go on forever.
CATHERINE CLANCY, sculptor and painter
ONE OF THE BRIGHTEST ROOMS IN ANY MUSEUM MUST SURELY BE the Clore Gallery at Tate Britain which houses the paintings of Turner. His paintings are veritable explosions of light. They are canvases pulsing with energy made visible. Turner loved to paint the ocean and often bathed it in a beautiful urgency of sunlight. Turner’s yellows are rich, luminous and passionate. With him you often feel as though colour is the mother of essence, the source out of which the object grows and emerges. The Harbour of Brest (1826–8) depicts the harbour suffused in light. Sometimes in a scene the objects and the material world become faint as light drenches everything. You feel many of his scenes are barely held to that moment. They are poised on a precarious threshold between emerging and receding light. Turner manages to turn the magnificent moment of radiance into a still, other moment where all could empty and vanish. He is the master of iridescence and evanescence; yet, ironically, the pigments in his paintings are incredibly delicate and beautiful. In Patrick Heron’s phrase: ‘Colour is shape and shape is colour. Form exists but colour is there first.’ Turner’s palette is often subdued too, as in Waves breaking against the Wind. This painting portrays an anonymous seascape, yet his genius renders the motion of the sea and the spray of the wind as an intimate event and place. The colours are toned to make sea and wind particular and personal. He uses greys, whites and ochre work against a faint yellow sky.
Once in Mexico I went out fishing before dawn with a local fisherman. When we were well out into the ocean the dawn came up with all the beauty of a Turner painting. The horizon became one huge refined yellow and orange apocalypse. It was like a divine salute to all the submerged dreaming of the ocean.
G
REEN
: T
HE
C
OLOUR OF
G
ROWTH
WHILE YELLOW REVEALS THE OUTER JOY AND KINDNESS OF LIGHT, the workings of light have entered more deeply into the colour green. Green is the colour of growth, the colour of hope. As winter begins to relent, the first green buds appear. Against the bare barks of tree and bush they seem out of place, some kind of mistake. Yet these infant spots of green secretly hold all the fabulous dressage of the spring, summer and autumn colour yet to appear.
One of my favourite images from childhood is of summer meadows. After the hay was cut, the shorn white meadows would quickly recover and a few weeks later these meadows would be clumped with fresh, new after-grass. Often, then, the sheep would be let in to graze there. When you opened the gate, you could almost feel the meadow breathing. It was absolutely carpeted with grass. The colour of this grass was so rich as to seem blue-green. The sheep needed neither introduction nor persuasion; they simply gave in and became instant addicts!
Green is the colour of youthfulness; it is full of spring energy. It is the colour of the earth aflourish. Green is not static but full of the energy and direction of growth, urgent on its journey towards the light. Gravity cannot keep it down; the call of light is always stronger. Green is the colour of relentless desire. Even from under earth smothered over with concrete or tarmacadam, the green blade will rise. Nothing can keep grass down. Its desire endures, holding itself focused to enter the most minuscule crevice and begin its soft climb to the high light. You can find the green blade anywhere – on top of ancient ruins way above the ground or growing in little indentations on top of massive rocks. It rests the eye, and still remains the colour of the day’s desire. You will find little or no green in the sky! Only in writing this did I become aware that my eyes had always known this but my mind had not yet realized it.
Because we tend to place ourselves at the centre of the spaces we occupy, we inevitably view these spaces in terms of how they house us. We rarely consider them in relation to how they might feel as a shape of embrace or confinement. Imagine what a trauma it must be for a room when the colour of its paint is changed. Imagine how a room that has lived as soft yellow for years feels behind a new countenance of green!! Still more disturbing, consider how a colour can become a distilled memory image. The Irish famine was one of the most brutal and dark times in our history. My father often spoke of hearing his grandfather coming in and telling of finding a man dead on our mountains and how his lips were green. The hunger had driven him to eat grass.
B
LUE
: T
HE
C
OLOUR OF
F
ARAWAY
What advantage would someone have over me who knew a
direct path from blue to yellow?
WITTGENSTEIN
DISTANCE AND LIGHT OFTEN CONSPIRE TO CREATE UNEXPECTED beauty. On certain summer days the dark mountains here in Conamara become suffused with delicate blue fog. In the distance the mountains lose their coarse eroded aspect and assume the dream of being shrouded in delicate muslin of blue. There is nothing else left but blue. Distance loves blue. More often than not distance will choose to express its faraway-ness in blue. Somehow it feels appropriate that distance and loss have the same colour and the colour of such sorrow is blue. This conviction is at the heart of the haunting music we call ‘The Blues’. When someone says or sings ‘I have the blues’, the tonality enfolds us. There are certain valleys in the interior worlds that seem to be totally blue. The blue suggested by the blues has a dignity and completion to it. The blues may wail but ultimately they are not narcissistic or sycophantic. There is recognition of a higher order, that sooner or later destiny may play everyone a blue card. The phrase ‘I have the blues’ seems to cohere with the tonality of such destiny and experience. It is impossible to feel the same gravitas if another colour is used: I’ve got the whites or I’ve got the yellows does not evoke the elegant darkness that blue conveys.
Red was the dominant colour of ancient civilization until the high Middle Ages. During all this time there was practically no attention to blue. Yet in the late Middle Ages blue took the place of red as the West’s favourite colour. Then for more than three centuries, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, blue became dominant. It was the colour reserved for Mary, Mother of God and for royalty. In the eighteenth century the use of indigo and the discovery of Prussian blue ended the reign of blue.
N
IGHT AND
D
AY
A
RE
I
NSIDE
B
LUE
YET BLUE IS A STRANGE COLOUR. IT HOLDS NIGHT AND DAY WITHIN it. Though the land is mostly without blue, this makes clearance to intensify the blue of sky and water. The earth could have no more perfect covering than the sky. Earth and sky complement and counterpoint each other so perfectly because each is invested with the predominantly absent colour of the other. The earth is green, the sky has no green. The sky is blue, the earth has no blue. The ocean is the great mirror of the sky. It holds its own reserve of transparent mystery under its blue surface. Goethe says that rather than coming at us or hemming us in, blue draws us after it into the distance. Blue seems to be the colour of the infinite – an endless expanse where darkness and brightness dwell in blue light.