O
UT OF THE
B
LUE
BLUE OFTEN SEEMS TO STAND AT A MYSTERIOUS ANGLE TO HUMAN sensibility and intention. When something absolutely unexpected visits our lives, we say: it came out of the blue. Of the unexpected that in all probability will never occur, or at most happen rarely, we have the phrase: once in a blue moon. These unnoticed phrases in our language confirm blue as the indecipherable source from where the unexpected sets out towards us. All the while we continue with our lives never suspecting that we have become its destination and target. Great rituals are meant to harness and bless the unexpected. Perhaps this is why blue appears as desirable for a bride. For her wedding, it is recommended that she have:
Something old,
Something new,
Something borrowed,
Something blue.
When we quarried limestone, it was surprising to find deep beneath the white-grey surface a richer colour. When we broke into the deeper layering and the caked stone fell out, we noticed that the interior of the limestone was a rich blue. This blue depth of limestone was often counterpointed by white knuckles of fossil nesting within it. The most beautiful blue stone of all is of course lapis lazuli.
The other blue of childhood was bluestone. In summer the green potato stalks were sprayed with bluestone to prevent blight. We had to fill a large barrel of water and then the powdered bluestone was suspended in the water in a canvas bag. For some days afterwards the potato stalks looked as if they had been caught out in a blue rain.
C
OLOUR
T
HRESHOLDS
The line changes the colour of the colours on either side of it.
PATRICK HERON
A colour shines in its surroundings. (Just as eyes only smile in a face.)
WITTGENSTEIN
OUR EXPLORATION OF COLOUR HAS CONCENTRATED ON CERTAIN distinctive colours but every colour tends to change in the vicinity of other colours.
Colour is the clothing of beauty. No colour stands alone. Each single colour emerges in a dance where its other sustaining partners are invisible. Colour is always a togetherness that remains kinetic, a brightening or darkening. Yet each colour has its own individuality, personality and native mood. The divine artistry of nature is seen in how lyrically it combines and modulates its raiment of colours. Natural beauty is not accidental. There is a wondrous elegance and grace of imagination behind it. An artist who takes her easel outside to paint the most ordinary corner of a field learns quietly the intricacy, elegance and majesty of what is hidden in the ordinary. Colour has bequeathed her deepest secrets to nature.
Within even one, single colour there is a fluent geography of tone: at one end the colour belongs more to the darkness, at the other end more to the light. Each colour is its own spectrum. Within itself and together with other colours each colour remains fluent in that perennial yet elusive dance of hue.
Vasili Kandinsky, the Russian painter, often said that when he saw colour, he heard music: ‘Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another to cause vibrations in the soul.’
Paul Klee said: ‘Colour links us with cosmic regions. In this it is similar to music. Colour can take on, in the same manner as musical tones, myriad possible shades from the first small steps to the rich flowering of the coloured chord.’
We will conclude our exploration with a pen sketch of a master colourist, Vermeer: his use of light and subtlety of tone evoke the inner nuance and sophistication of colour.
V
ERMEER
:
D
ELICATE
M
YSTERIES IN
E
XQUISITE
S
TILLNESS
THE FRICK MUSEUM IN NEW YORK IS ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL museums in the world. You can literally walk in, out of the noise and maze of Manhattan streets, to find yourself in another era, in a mansion with some of the world’s most magnificent paintings. Among the Frick collection are several masterpieces by Vermeer.
Vermeer was a seventeenth-century Dutch painter from Delft. His subjects have little to do with heroic action or epic themes. Indeed, they have nothing to do with action at all. Yet this artist has created works of immense beauty, choosing incidental moments in the ordinary life of unknown people. His imagination and skill create scenes imbued with qualities evoking great drama that remain understated yet charged with subtle force. Vermeer’s paintings are real presences. His most famous is probably Girl with a Pearl Earring. This has been called ‘The Dutch Mona Lisa’. It is a painting of a young girl against a black background. She has just turned her head to look at us. Vermeer catches her in this pure moment of unguarded attention. She is wearing a blue turban. Her mouth is open and its corners seem moist. She seems utterly pure and fresh and she has a clear innocence. Yet her eyes are dark, uncertain and questioning. Though imprecise, the pearl earring glows against the dark. The darkness outlines her, as if for a moment it had just released her. But its shadows still claim her back, her neck and much of her face. The light blue of the turban is unexpected but perfect. It crowns her presence beautifully. This blue is more radiant still because part of it is caught in dark shadow. The arc of the turban that is illuminated seems almost like a halo, an arc of sky-blue over this young soul caught between darknesses. That stillness of blue seems to know more already than her life-voyage will ever discover. Vermeer achieves the portrait of innocence caught in a moment of questioning wonder, a bright moment hung perfectly from the dark.
Vermeer’s paintings are visual poems. On a small canvas he can evoke the inner world latent in a suspended moment. He manages to slow time down until transparent stillness envelops the scene. In that stillness the multiple futures of the scene are caught in the glimmer of their as yet unchosen possibility. The colours are always subtle and the composition is simply exquisite. You forget that you are looking at a flat surface and that a painting is merely an illusion made with paint. Vermeer brings you right up close and allows you to peer into a scene that has the visual integrity of reality. The scene is utterly ordinary. And it is the delicate creation of this deceptive ordinariness that is one of his greatest achievements. It seems to be completely natural. The figures seem so securely there. It is as though we are permitted to lift a veil and glance in at lives that exist without us. Each scene is unforced. Vermeer invests them with a tranquillity which invites and confirms our instinctive trust. Someone once said that the introversion of Bach’s music echoes the introversion of Vermeer’s paintings and their ineffable visual music.
Vermeer is the master in evoking interior spaces. In The Soldier with a Laughing Girl, a soldier with his back to us is seated at a table with a girl who faces him and us. From an open window light comes in. Vermeer achieves great depth through the technique of single point perspective. He makes the Cavalier’s figure larger so that the girl becomes more diminutive and thus seems further away from us. The officer has a long red coat which is radiant in the light. His huge hat with its shadow almost completely hides his face from us. The girl’s face and upper body take the brunt of the light. Her mouth is open, her face is intent and interested, her head is covered with a white scarf. The light through the window is what confers reality on the scene. The exquisite modulation of the light evokes the mood and the depth of the skin tone. The transmutation of light is the key to Vermeer. The quality of the light is the signature of the drama. The slow, attentive light fills the space between the two figures and sustains their gazing, yet it leaves the surround of their figures and the rest of the scene suffused with shadow. Light precedes object in Vermeer; it is as though it is the light itself that is imagining the scene within the painting. This patient light evokes the invisible interiors concealed in the minds and hearts of the Cavalier and the girl. It bestows a remarkable calm on what is most probably a seduction scene. There is dignity, longing and the sustained Eros of approach and approaching delight. Through the careful delicacy of composition and the immaculate restraint of mood, Vermeer is almost able to render the introverted world explicit. He holds the tension of that threshold between image and silence in perfect balance.