Dear Permanence,

We have greatly enjoyed your colourful outfit but it is high time to get undressed....stripped. PART II on Colour

(Part I, on getting the blues you find here)

Where were we? Oh yes, blues. The royal friggin' blues. Nobel colours. Claimed by rich folk. Focused on by us moderns in an attempt to remove fragility from the fragile.

Permanence. That was the core of the quest. To find more colours that last longer. To turn the mundane to gold. To get away from a life that is bleak, and grey and filthy, sickly and short, into one that is pure and bright, healthy, strong, and everlasting. We all would become kings and queens if we only had the colours to match. Purity and brightness that lasts. The desire to shine till eternity. Am I exaggerating? Not much. Not much at all I'm afraid.

The drive for these posts on colour was to write a hymn. A song of praise. Instead, I find myself dismantling misconceptions, exposing pharmaceutical crimes and wading knee-deep in quantum theory.

Like I have this giant ugly block of marble that has been on the workshop floor for ages. It's been worked on by a whole row of other artists before me, and here I am.

Sigh, I think I will paint you a pucture instead. In the form of writing.

The orderly kind of non-fiction writer would do a colour per post, or a timeline, start with the basics and work their way up the ladder. The Internet and books are full of those. You have read a few, probably. So, I want to skip that.

The attempt is to step back as far as we dare, to see some stuff far too up close to notice in the daily mode. It means the lines between physics, history, painting practice, and life's bloody pranks get a bit blurry. I hope you can forgive me for trespassing, several times.

Stepping back, putting colour in perspective, so we can clearly see. Humans are good at seeing, right? We are privileged with this brightly coloured panoramic, stereoscopic gaze.

Well.....not so much. Blind as bats, doesn't ever cover our visual handicap.

If you imagine the electromagnetic spectrum (don't be afraid said the angel, it's just words), if you imagine the field of light as a wall. A ten-meter wide wall right in front of you. And there is a slid of roughly three centimetres, an inch (conservative guess because we are not sure) in the thick brickwork. Thirty mill, to see the landscape —or whatever is on the other side— would you still feel like having a great view?

That's how wide the visible bit is. The whole rainbow and then some fits in that narrow gap.

To understand colour, we need to know at least a bit about the wall.

On the port side, we find the big waves, called infrared and radio-waves. Oh, and the numbered G-brothers too, like 4 and 5G. (The higher the number the smaller the prick, so typical). To our starboard live the finer waves. Or I could say there the wall is built of smaller bricks. Or pricks, if you prefer. Ultraviolet, Twitter-rays (can't get used to the X) and the Gamma-gamma live out there.

I know, very confusing, why not make up their mind? Wave or particle, so annoying they want to be both. We do have one name for them to make it lighter on the braincells. Yes pun, sorry, that name is Photon.

The description of a Photon you can already find in old religious esoteric books. There they call them angels. But you can hardly tell them apart. But anyway, let's call them Photons. They come in sizes, they're all weightless, and pure light, but they differ in strength and length. Amplitude and frequency, sorry, couldn't help myself there. The important bit for you and me is that all photons on the blue side of the visible can harm us, carbon-based entities, the bigger photons on the red end of the wall not so much.

Keep that in mind.

Back to colour.

Have you ever seen a medieval manuscript? One of those illuminated pages? How vivid they are, like the last strokes of egg tempera have been laid down just this morning. Now they are behind glass and lighted sparsely to protect them.

Protect them from what?

From attacks.

Yes, physical attacks too, but also the forces from the weightless realm. Or differently said the colours need to be kept from the light. Photons of the blue end attack the physical particles. The molecules are destroyed, broken up. And they lose their character. The colour fades.

The energy we call light enters matter. It can go right through. Like even passing through the whole planet and not even be bothered. But it can also enter the skin, the soil the, the stone and break it. It can make it shake and tremble. Heat it until it melts and burns. The light-energy-photon-wave-thingy is absorbed. Matter eats light and is changed by it. You are not just a vegetarian, but also a lumitarian.

We need the lower frequencies, and are devoured by the higher realm. Are you listening, my dear light-groupies? Light destroys as much as it gives life. Raising the frequency leads to a place with no shelter.

Photons can't help but interact. They either go right though or clash into matter and are absorbed. Yes, I know you have learned that light bounces. But it doesn't, but some interactions go so fast and leave so little trace it looks like reflection, like bouncing. But the photons 'bouncing' off matter are not the same photons as the ones coming in.

Let that sink in.

The incoming photons are absorbed by the matter they encounter. Their energy changes matter, and matter responds by making a new set of photons. Light and matter are both changed through the interaction.

I have simplified a process at the quantum level that we hardly grasp. We do use it widely. Have done so for a long time. The induced release of photons in a pile of oak and ash we call fire. (Have you ever stopped for a second to meditate on the insane fact of light emitting wood?) We gladly receive the extra photons radiating out. We, us living animals, share them abundantly too. Can't help but. We light up, even through our clothing. We imprint our light signature on the ecology.

So, what we see is light emitting from matter, in response to being hit by incoming photons. Yes, and some materials emit a different range of photons than others. If it looks black, most of the visible light is absorbed by the material. If it looks green or pink or turquoisy mauve, only a certain wavelength is released. White is a special case, it reflects the whole visible bundle, but not like a mirror. The re-emitted light splashes off, it scatters in all directions. Something shiny, conserves the order of the incoming light, it keeps the configuration, so we can see their origins, projecting back the 'image' of the source.

Complicated? Yes, it is. Quantum level difficult. But I hope you didn't miss that flutter of awe hidden in the above.

Did I just say we emit light? Yes, I did. The colour of your skin is a bundle of excited photons. You are radiant.

And I just said that our relation with our ecology is one of intimate energy exchange. Of trading light. Matter and light are deeply entwined. We are energy beings, light entities in a literal sense.

Life and water are connected intimately. Colour and water too. So maybe life and colour also have a more profound relationship than you expected.

Frequency is about the size of the wave. Longer wavelengths are bigger. This is the red end of the spectrum. Visible red extending to invisible red. Infra-red. Heat. These photons have less energy, less impact on matter. With radio waves at the far end. They can be kilo-meter size waves.

Beaming radio waves at a Rembrandt painting is harmless. They pass right through.

But shorten the wave, and it gets more dangerous for us and for the colours. Now here's the astonishing connection. If the wave, the photon-particle-package, gets smaller than a water molecule, it acquires the power to destroy matter. Not the water itself, which by strange coincidence is highly 'transparent', letting the photons enter mostly unbothered.

All molecules smaller than water can be broken down by light. The light-energy-photon-package gets the upper hand.

What does this mean for us painters?

Well, to say it differently and simplified, anything that dissolves in water, will fade quickly. The smaller the particle of the colour, the easier it looses its characteristics.

Pigments are the colour particles that do not dissolve in water. Dyes do. The bigger the particle (the molecule) of the pigment, the more 'permanent' it gets.

Lead, one of the heaviest molecules, provides one of the most durable pigments. Lead oxide. The white that made many a highlight.

So water is the threshold. Humans are at the dissolvable end of things. We fade easily. We proudly belong to the fragile, the soluble, the impermanent.

Especially compared to the mineral kingdom. The earths and the clays and the gems, which provide a whole range of permanent colours. The metallic oxides are a great source too. Grinding them to the finest possible powder enlarges the surface and makes the colour more intense. Add a bit of glue, and you have yourself a paint, or a crayon, or some lipstick.

Cook or grind some plant-based stuff, like berries, and you get a brightly coloured juice, and the most intense purple fingers from picking those blackberries, but if you use that in a watercolour it lasts only a few days.

This is also why reds are difficult, vulnerable colours. The warm colours are smaller than the cold ones, at the blue end.

The warm earths are under our feet, the cooling blues above, and the greens grow in between. The earths skin shields life from harmful light. Because if we would meet light face to face in full glory, full spectrum, we would cease.

Scary. So, we fought back. Found ways to increase the durability, we wanted to sustain, to keep the delights of summer all winter. To catch that sunrise and hang it above the couch. To hold and keep.

We have left no stone unturned in that quest. By now, we are grinding up the planet to reach that goal of permanence. We don't like things that fade. It is a childish, unwise dislike, though.

Desiring permanence seen in this light gets a different shade of pale. Those bright colours suddenly seem more aggressive, threatening, maybe not evil, but a bit much, a bit too loud, too all-over-the-place. They overstay their welcome. Like party decorations that you have hanging all year round. Like two guys screeching in a choir.

Should we even put so much energy (like literally) in permanence?

The great work of extending the range of colours has taken many centuries and is a heavy history book all on its own. But at some point, in prolonging the season of strawberries, in having all the music all the time, in extending, and painting, and upgrading, and progress, we have lost sight of who we are. Of the colour of our skins. We interact with the light. We are alive and temporary and very fragile. That is not a problem to be solved. Permanence is not a goal. It is a fear-driven run from the sweet-spot of life. It is getting depressed because flowers die, while forgetting to rejoice in their existence. And that marvellous limited place lies somewhere in the narrow gap, within the range of the living. No hard boundaries. It is a sphere. The arc of the rainbow that appears now and then could be a reminder. This is the scope, this is the view, this is the place. You are here.

My colouring advice for this week: don't be afraid to fade back into those earthly shades. You are not matter, you are light.

Let's look at purity next week. Another fun subject.

If you enjoyed this essay, you might also like my serial fiction about festivals….

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