Anam Cara

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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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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 neutral: 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.

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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.

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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.

In the Native American tradition a whole new era of transfiguration is initiated by the birth of the sacred white buffalo calf. Within the Christian tradition, the new time was to begin with the lamb: ‘And behold the lion shall lie down with the lamb . . . And there shall be no more hurt or pain on all my holy mountain.’ One of the most exhilarating epiphanies in the New Testament is the Transfiguration of Jesus on Mount Tabor. In this moment, the poet-carpenter let ‘his glory be seen’. This is an event of the most radiant, blinding whiteness.

It is interesting that the Spirit of inspiration, renewal and transfiguration, the Holy Spirit, is symbolized by a white dove. Peace and serenity too are symbolized by the dove. White is also the colour of surrender. Elementally, the poles where the earth ends are also white: the Arctic and the Antarctic. White is the colour of the ocean when she is restless or when she dances, her white foamy waves crashing to the shore.

The appearance and definition of white is made possible by the presence of darkness and perhaps the softest light that shines upon the earth is moonlight. The white light of the moon is infinitely gentle with the dark. It insists on no awakening or disturbance of colour except for the occasional illumination of a breaking wave. The moon guides the rhythm of the tides and the red rhythm of the blood. Held with such nobility in the dome of night, it offers an ever-ebbing journey of light. It wanes to a clean, vertical arch of light, almost a question mark high in the night. Then over the course of a month, its faith of light grows until it becomes a full circle of the most subtle illumination, at ease with the singularity of the dark but faithful to the courage of individual forms which it visits and holds in outline everywhere. The colour of moonlight against the black dome of night seems blue-white.

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WE INEVITABLY ASSOCIATE BEAUTY WITH PERFECTION. BUT THERE can also be great beauty in something that is imperfect and unfinished. One of the best examples of this is at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and is by the German painter Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528): a painting in oil on wood called Salvator Mundi. It is a powerful painting. When you enter the room, it immediately claims your eye. It depicts Christ, the ‘Saviour of the World’. His right hand is raised in blessing. The earth is represented by the globe he holds in his left hand. Christ is dressed in a beautiful rich blue alb, with a crimson cloak draped over his shoulders. His hair hangs down his shoulders in long, rich brown ringlets and his face is angled to the right. Dürer began this painting shortly before he departed for Italy in 1505 but he never finished it. Portions of the hands and the face of Christ are not painted. Dürer had however drawn in the features of the face and hands and these drawings are visible against the white panel. Against the deep, rich coloured background and drapery the unpainted face is a white illumination shining forth from the painting. We know that the uniqueness of Jesus is his essence: God in the form of a man. This unfinished painting achieves the happy accident of enabling the beauty and radiance of a divine face to shine from a human body.

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The beauty of colour . . . derives from shape,

from the conquest of the darkness inherent in Matter,

by the pouring in of light, the unembodied . . .

PLOTINUS, Enneads

THROUGHOUT THE HISTORY OF COLOUR THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN the suspicion that colours belonged only to the surface. Deep down everything was dark and black. Farm life seemed to confirm this. In spring the plough would turn a green field into a black one. Turned over, the green skin of grass revealed dark earth underneath. Work on the bog brought further evidence of dark under-surfaces. Externally, the bog is the most sophisticated patchwork of subtle colours: saffron, purple, brown, white and green. Even in the midst of winter one can discover on the boggy black summit the most beautiful traces of burgundy. In springtime when turf is cut the bog is laced with colours. The top scraw is cleaned off to isolate the layer of turf to be cut. The browner turf is on top. The deeper you cut, the darker the turf becomes until you finally reach the last layers of turf down on the stone. This turf comes out like large slabs of black butter. It is called cloch mhoin, literally, stone turf. When it dries, this is always the hardest turf. Cutting down is a journey into the black archive of the bog’s memory. The blackest turf belongs to the oldest time; on a cold winter’s night, by the open fire, the blackest turf burns longest and gives the brightest flame.

Our ancestors were persistent voyagers in the dark. Without the benefit of artificial light, their day was lived between dawn and dusk. Their homes were caves – the dark mouths that nature had cut into the sides of hills, cliffs or mountains. Even during daylight it remained dark in there. Now and again, they must have longed to bring in some of the outside colour to adorn their caves. Imagine a mother gathering a bunch of the most beautiful wild flowers in blues, purples, yellows and whites, and placing them on some altar within the cave’s darkness. Imagine her seeing her dark home brightening with brief colour. Dwelling constantly in such a world of darkness, it is no wonder that sun and moon in their bright journeying would appear to be deities.

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BLACK IS PROBABLY THE MOST ANCIENT COLOUR, THE PRIMAL birth-source whence everything emerged. Darkness is the great canvas against which beauty becomes visible. Darkness withholds presence; it resists the beam of eye-light and deepens the mystery. The slightest flicker of bright wings can make the darkness of a night unforgettable. It is fascinating to consider that ancient kinship of light and dark, white and black. White light always shapes the darkest shadow. Indeed the shadow is the child of the threshold where black and white converge. There could be no shadow without light. A shadow is a dark figure cast on some surface by a body which stands in the way of light and takes the form of the intruding body. It is the counterpart of that body in black form. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung seizes upon this image for his theory of the shadow as the dark aspect of the self. The conscious self usually rejects the shadow and it is forced to dwell in the unconscious. The shadow originates in all the negative experiences a person has accumulated, and part of the task of becoming free is the retrieval of the banished shadow. There are many difficult riches trapped in the shadow side. Jung said the shadow held 90 per cent gold. To learn to recognize, accept and integrate the shadow is to transfigure much of the bruised areas of the heart which dwell in fear and unease and rob us of joy and creativity. For instance, an incredibly nice, smiling person who is doomed to please people often has a shadow side where anger and disdain are nested. Often the outside clown is internally sad and despairing. An abrasive, awkward presence can sometimes conceal the kindest heart. When we meet someone, we never know who we are actually meeting.

There are two words in Irish for shadow: scáth and scáil. Scáth includes the positive meaning of shelter. There is an old proverb: ‘Is ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine’, i.e., People live in one another’s shadow. This proverb suggests the intimacy of Celtic folk culture as a cohesive web which protects individuality in its shelter. The phrase gan scáth was also used (literally, ‘without shadow’) and it signified one who is fearless. Interestingly, scáil also means spirit, which together with soul and body makes up the threefold division of the person. And there is a wonderful poetic phrase for a very thin person: mar scáil i mbuidéal, like a shadow in a bottle. There is a poetic import to the phrase ‘without a shadow of a doubt’: in all probability, there is no doubt without a shadow. Doubt is the shadow cast when something gets in the way of the light. Ironically, doubt itself often brings greater light because of the shadow it casts. In Sonnet 27 Shakespeare has this lovely quatrain:

Save that my soul’s imaginary sight

Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,

Which like a jewel (hung in ghastly night),

Makes black night beauteous, and her old face new.

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IN TERMS OF PHYSICS, BLACK OCCURS WHEN AN OBJECT IS absorbing all of the coloured wavelengths. This is why nothing is reflected back. Black represents pure hunger for colour; it exercises no generosity, the eye receives nothing. When it looks at black, it is looking at the grave of colour. It is not surprising that black has been the colour of grief and mourning. In Western tradition, the priest wears black vestments when celebrating the funeral liturgy. The mourners wore black. When the husband died, for a period the woman wore widow’s weeds.

Goethe says that colours are the deeds and sufferings of light.

Yet it is not that black is without colour; it is rather that it is the absence, the outer surface, behind which colours secretly dwell. The heart of blackness is full of colour. The outer absence veils a rich interiority of presence. This casts an almost comic ambivalence on the wearing of black as a symbol of the ascetic.

Black is also the colour of ink. Books are printed in black ink. There is again some irony here: the most colourful worlds, characters and adventures live inside lines of black narrative. In contrast to prose, a poem leaves more room on the page for the white silence and space to intensify the black lines where the music is distilled. Indeed, in a world where colour is often garish, the simple clarity of black and white maintains a lovely dignity. This is especially true of photography. Fergus Bourke’s stunning black and white photographs of Conamara succeed in bringing out the unwatched stillness of this landscape. He looks carefully and waits for the days when Conamara unexpectedly reveals itself. He manages to delve deeper beneath the deft weave of colour until he can glimpse and catch in black and white the hidden liturgy of primal forms that shape this place. In film too, black and white can be hugely effective. Andrei Tarkovsky’s early film Andrei Rublev is magnificently constructed in a black and white sequence which schools the eyes in shadow and light all the way through until they become drenched in the glory of its final epiphany. Black has also been a dominant colour in spirituality. As we saw earlier, the mystics speak of the Dark Night of the Soul. Meister Eckhart said: ‘The Light that is God flows out and darkens every light.’

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IN THE LAST MONTHS OF HIS TURBULENT LIFE, CARAVAGGIO (1571–1610) completed his extraordinary dark painting, The Denial of Peter. It depicts Peter before a fireplace in the courtyard of the High Priest where one of the women is accusing Peter of being a follower of Christ. Two soldiers are also pointing their fingers at him and Peter is denying the three accusations. This canvas is so dark; it has none of the beauty or the softness that colour brings. It is a black painting of relentless and bleak psychological portraiture. The figures are shrouded in black and dark brown earth colours. The only light is meagre and illuminates the faces of the accusers and the startled, helpless eyes of the old, bald Peter, the betrayer. His finger points at himself. He knows what he is doing. His brow is furrowed and his eyes are wet with tears. His presence is not fearful but limp with resignation and shame; this contrasts with the alertness and vigour of his accusers. The betrayal of a friend, of a loved one, is an undignified, demeaning thing. Caravaggio’s powerful portraiture draws out the irreversible awfulness of the deed as the light of kindness and belonging fades in the encircling gloom. This is an incredible portrait of a moment when weakness killed beauty. This darkening gloom seems forever beyond the dream of dawn.

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THE NIGHT BREAKS WHEN THE RED FIRE OF DAWN IS KINDLED and the world glows again in the beauty of colour. Of all colours, red is perhaps the most passionate and intense. Red is never neutral. When red is present, something is happening: red is for danger. It is not a colour that dwells in some secure middle region where rest and stillness prevail. Red is a threshold colour; it tends to accompany and intensify beginnings and endings. Red is also the colour of birth and is probably the colour in which the universe was born. It is believed that the Big Bang was the primal red explosion out of which the cosmos emerged. Our earth was born in a red fire. Despite its solid outer surface, the heart of the earth is a wild fire-dance of red magma. When a volcano erupts we begin to understand that ground is only vaguely solid. The torrential red rivers that flow from a volcano reveal what a tenuous foundation ground is. Underneath the surface of the land and beneath the floor of the oceans, there is no solid stone-like foundation. The earth is grounded on a primordial red ocean. If it was red at the origin and is red at the root, it is somehow natural that the intense threshold experiences of life are often accompanied by the colour red.

Each colour has its own scale of brightness and red has many hues that range from dark crimson to faint orange. It has such force and vibrancy because it is the colour of life. Blood is the fluent stream that keeps the body alive, forever flowing out from and flowing back into the red well of the heart. Blood is also our most ancient stream. The secrets of ancestry, the blueprints for future descendants, sleep within this flow. It is a surprising image: within the permanent darkness of your body a ceaseless red-bush streaming. Like a mild bellows in the dark, breath deepens the life of the red: black and red are the primary colours at the heart of identity.

In the outer world too, these colours were often wed to evoke or confirm primal kinship. One thinks of wars and killings. Every event happens in time, and time moves on. Time erases even the most vibrant events. But place is somehow different. An experience never simply happens in a place: regardless of how hidden or internal an experience between people might be, it does not remain sealed between them, it leaks out and happens to the place as well. Landscape absorbs experience. There has always been the recognition that the earth holds a particularly intense memory in those places where blood was spilt. It is interesting that the colour red as such is rarely present in the land, yet primitive peoples may have imagined that the very earth itself calls out for revenge against the evil ones who spilled human blood. There is a mythic sense here that the flow of human blood can render a place disturbed – not merely some human frontier but a natural boundary has been violated: earth and blood should not be mixed. Traces of human biography seep in to disturb the pre-conscious stillness of the earth. It seems that when spilt on earth human blood leaves an indelible stain. The red tears of human blood disturb the innocence of the earth; through the blood, thoughts seep inside the clay to perhaps infest its stillness with the virus of narrative.

The letting of blood is one of the oldest ritual expressions of entering into a new bond. Blood brothers do it – so do the Mafia. When two people have a child together, the child is of them: their own flesh and blood. In the new child, the two red streams of ancestry flow further and forth into each other.

Few colours are as freighted with symbolic significance as red. In a girl’s life, the arrival of the red flow signifies the transition to womanhood. She becomes a daughter of the moon, kin to its rhythm of red tide. In the life of a revolutionary movement the ultimate sacrifice for the fatherland is often seen as the willingness to spill one’s blood.

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IN RELIGION RED IS A VITAL COLOUR. ONE OF THE CENTRAL ICONS of the Catholic Church is the Sacred Heart. This is a picture of Jesus with the red heart exposed and framed in thorns; it is portraiture of love as sacrifice. At the heart of Christianity the colour is red. The pinnacle of love is realized in the spilling of the blood of Jesus. In the Eucharist, bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. The ultimate gift is a red gift. Kinship with Jesus is not achieved merely through sentiment, idea or faith but in the visceral act of eating his body and drinking his blood: filling oneself with the redness of Jesus. It is no wonder that red was the primary colour in medieval art and chemistry. After Pentecost Sunday the priest wears red vestments at mass. Here red symbolizes the flame of new courage and transfiguration which the Holy Spirit brings. One of the most beautiful religious uses of red is the red of the sanctuary lamp. It is lovely at night to enter a dark oratory and find that lamp aglow, a red womb-light that invites you to kneel in reverence before the Presence of Presences.

Before electricity came to rural areas, the candle and the oil lamp were the means of light. These lights left the room still predominantly wrapped in shadow. Such shadow provided the ideal darkening to bring out the red mysteries of the open fire. The fire was wonderful to watch. People who lived on their own would say: the fire is company. The fire was a happening, a narrative that began as a spark within a cold mound of darkness. Then it built and bloomed until each sod of dead turf became fluent and the whole fire was entwined in the dance. The sounds crackled and deepened and fell gradually into white, silent ashes.

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MY FAVOURITE PAINTING IN RED IS LA COIFFURE BY EDGAR DEGAS at the National Gallery in London. It is a painting of an older woman combing a girl’s hair. Her head extends over the back of the chair and the woman combs her red hair out into the same red background of the canvas. The older woman is wearing a white apron and a cerise blouse. The girl wears an orange-red dress and there is a white table angled at the front of the painting. Matisse owned and loved this painting. In some strange way you are made to feel as if the orange redness of the scene is being combed from the young woman, out through her hair. Her fiery red interiority is being combed out. And although a vibrant red/orange takes over almost the entire canvas, there remains a profound serenity at the heart of this painting.

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Imagine someone pointing to a place in the iris of a Rembrandt

eye and saying: ‘The walls in my room should be painted this

colour’.

WITTGENSTEIN

A YELLOW FIRE BURNS ETERNALLY, AWAY OUT IN THE INFINITE distance of the cosmos. All colour, light and earthly life depend on that yellow furnace. Without our knowing it, distance, as always, is one of our great protectors. Were we nearer to the yellow fire-source, it would scorch everything to cinders. Conversely, were this sun-fire to slip down into a crevice in the pattern that holds its face towards us, the earth would freeze over and all life would disappear. The colour yellow holds such warmth, brightness and attraction for us because it is the colour of the source that sustains us. A room that is yellow can throw a glad brightness back into the space it surrounds. Put some pinks, reds and burnt umber in there and it almost feels as though you are nestled within a honeycomb!

Goethe says: ‘Yellow brings with her the nature of brightness and has a delightful, encouraging, exciting and soft quality.’ We see this in spring with the daffodils. Wordsworth catches the surprise of their yellow apparition. But it is also a moment of beauty which remains ever present in his memory and makes solitude sweet:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude.

T

HE

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IELDS OF

S

AFFRON

THE LIGHT IN CONAMARA IS ALWAYS COMPLEX. HOWEVER, LATE autumn, early winter brings a new colour surprise. From being pale and slightly forlorn, the bog grass begins to deepen into the richest saffron and is gilded with yellow and orange. Against the cold, black winter mountains these newly arrived fields stand out and when the rain ceases and sunlight returns, the saffron fields take flame. The landscapes illuminate as if lit from underneath and the mountains stand dark among fields of blazing saffron. It is as though the rain had cleansed and polished the grass in order for the sun to effect absolute illumination. This miracle of illumination is recognized in the local phrase: buíochas dhon Fhómhair – Thanks to the autumn.

Years ago almost every family home in Ireland had its altar of holy pictures. In these pictures the heads of the saints were rimmed with yellow haloes. Because they were saints, the invisible world was already brightening towards visibility around them. The haloes were not attached to the heads; some secret firmness in the air seemed to keep them in place. In the Christian religious tradition, the glory of God has always been imagined in terms of light and this glory is the name of ultimate divine beauty. All light is then a manifestation of divine beauty.

As we have seen, in terms of its physics, yellow has absorbed red and green and then reflects yellow back. Red is the colour of life, blood and fire; and green is the colour of growth and of hope. Little wonder that yellow has such a life-giving brightness.

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N

A

UTUMN

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IELD OF

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ORN

THOUGH FARM WORK IS HARD, THERE ARE CERTAIN TIMES IN EACH season when the work becomes beautiful and the farmer becomes an artist who transforms the landscape. In autumn the corn is ripe and there is a special threshold when the pale yellow turns golden. Farmers watch for this turning; for this is the time to cut the corn. Cutting corn with a scythe is hard, but also beautifully rhythmic work. When your eye develops, you know exactly the measure of corn to choose, then in one clear curved swing of the scythe, you have an exact sheaf. It is the one kind of farm work where there is such an intricate strange combination: surface gold where the ripe ears of corn become enriched with light, but beneath the ears the Kafkaesque grid of endless linearity and then at the end, the fallen field of gold with its new surface of sharp, cut-off stems. Late at evening a field of stooks stands against the light and the golden stubble is apostrophized with the black crows and ravens who have watched and waited all day for the time of feasting to come.

The flame of a candle is a beautiful yellow. But it is a yellow that carries its own shadow and below both of them is the concealed red tip of the burning wick.

Lemons wear lovely yellow over their sour well of juice.

Children are fascinated by colour. A new gift with gorgeous colour can absolutely enthral a child’s mind. They will want to show everyone the beauty of their new gift. Their innocent wonder is eager to share its delight and seek confirmation, especially from an adult. The loneliest representation of such a moment I have seen was in a photograph in an exhibition of photographs from a Jewish ghetto during the Holocaust. A young child, his face full of excitement, is pointing to his sweater to show his new yellow star to a Nazi soldier.

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.

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REEN

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HE

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OLOUR OF

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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

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HE

C

OLOUR OF

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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.

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IGHT AND

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AY

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NSIDE

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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.

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

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D

ELICATE

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YSTERIES IN

E

XQUISITE

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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.

Vermeer’s work attracts us because we feel drawn into the point of the intimacy where an event is secretly building towards its own definition or disclosure. His contemplative attention is able to imagine and compose a scene which becomes cumulatively deeper, the deeper you gaze into it. These are scenes of carefully selected and distilled presence. Vermeer is a master at suggesting the quiet depths that dwell behind appearance. He evokes them as they are about to stir towards the surface. The masterly stillness is achieved through his uncanny ability to render such depths of emotion with refined transparency. His simplicity is mystery rendered lyrical. In a loud and garish neon time, the quietude of his work draws our eyes into a subtle rhythm of gazing where we might come to glimpse the structures of quiet depths. His reticence is more vocal than any statement or description. Each scene is created with a grace of proportion and sureness of measure. We are shown just enough to imagine everything else. In Vermeer all the secrets are held inside the weight of stillness.