Setting up the triangle

On overcoming the fear to show your true colours....(and coming out as a diehard Cindy Lauper fan)

Bertus

Feb 18, 2024

This post is part IV of a series on colour:

Part I It starts with getting the blues

Part II Dear Permanence

Part III The Colour Scheme

Do you have a favourite colour?

I bet you do. And even if it is not as specific as Azurite, Falu or even Lusty Gallant, you probably prefer one group over the other. From a young age, we divide the available range into colours we like, and others we dislike. In shades we think of as beautiful and those we call ugly. We do the same with food, and music, cars and people. Based on how they look, sound, taste.

That habit might be weirder than you think. While it is totally understandable that you love a certain song, and hate the piece of noise pretending to be music (or the other way around). It is a bit strange to have that same specific preference about frequencies. Loving the G's but not having the B's? Loving melodies that go up, but despising descending tones?

A slow realisation came to me over the years of teaching colour. It is challenging to put into words. It has a spiritual dimension. Every single time I taught a painting class, I ran into the edge. The outer edge of what people could handle. I want to call it their range. It limited their creative ability. To the point that when a participant shared they had an absolute favourite colour, I knew there was trouble ahead.

A detail of one of my ‘dreamscapes’, I set up paintings using hardly any functional colour. Just trying to capture the light first. Her hand tries to hold on to her wings….

In the alla prima workshops, we tried to establish the 'real' colours of a small still life set up. Massively difficult. To establish what exact colour that orange has on the shadowy bit. And then accepting that weird greenish puke as the right one for that spot asks a lot from people who only want pretty colours. Colours they like and love. The exercise asked them to let go of their attached meaning. To allow colour to speak to them. It forced them to read the naked light without judgement. Exactly like when you really start to listen. Or really feel. That is scary.

Their likes and dislikes got in the way. It prevented them from getting a deeper relation with whatever was center stage and 'speaking'. It also held the aspiring painters from a lot of the available beauty. Especially the dislikes. The no go’s. But also the likes were often not genuine enough to go deep, it wasn't love, they were just shallow judgements from a distance.

The result of a group exercise. In the Alla Prima workshop, six people were asked to add ‘a single brush-stroke’ alternately. Just mix a colour, load the brush, and place the stroke. I’d set a time limit, to keep the pace high. No discussion or commenting. Then leaving it to the next to add, undo or correct. What a revealing concept. On average the collective paintings were ‘better’ than the individual ones.

The colour practice asks to open your eyes and really see. To remove the fixed meanings we have attached to colours. Only then the light can come in. The ability to be open is functional. Not just an ethical should. I would even say it is a crucial skill. Soundwaves and lightwaves carry messages. That's also how we have come to use them (yes, not our invention, we nicked that idea). Sound and light have always talked to us. They still do. And I don't mean their carrier wave function. How we use sound to speak. Light to transmit data, images. Radiowaves to communicate. And a million other ways we donkey-load the frequencies with 'fixed' information. I want to explore a deeper level. A level that we are increasingly insensitive to. A guide that gets smothered under the heavy load. And what we do not allow in, the messages we ignore, or cover up, overwrite, warp, will come around to haunt us.

There are many harmonic rules. What goes well with what. Consonants and dissonants. Scales. From there you could build a whole structure. Telling you this is better than that. This is a good combination, and this is bad. But both music and colour rise above that. That's why I am not giving you a colour system. I want you to put all rules aside. Put down the map and look.

After bringing permanence and purity to the foreground, not just in these last posts of mine but in our culture too, we have discovered both concepts come with a very dark shadow.

What colour do you dislike?

Art is such a healing practice because we can experiment. Commit murder without hurting a single cell. We can poison the field and not be left with a thousand years of damage. Art allows failing, messing up, making mistakes and it will teach. It will teach it is not about the colour itself in the first place.

Have you ever mixed paint? Not to find the right colour, not to get from here to there. But just observing what happens. To be awed by matter shifting in character within seconds. Physical transformation happening right in front of you. If you discover the joy and deep magic of mixing colour, you are half a painter already. If you discover the joy of moving your limbs and body, you are half a dancer at least. If you discover the joy of making sound, you are well on your way to making music. All start with playing.

It is because you pay attention. You see, feel, listen, discover, encounter, all playfully. You attend the interaction. Paying attention is a hijacked phrase. The moment it is someone else that decides where you place your attention you have lost your core power1. You have given away the most important skill. Presence. If you are forced to pay attention you loose the openness. And openness is the guide.

What are you seeing, feeling and hearing? You might be tempted to mention the colour, the movement, the sound. We are trained that way. To determine the what by things, objects. But the 'artist' shifts from that kind of what and pays attention to the change occurring. To the relation. The interaction.

The triangle

This may sound simple, but it is not. Change is a three-way relationship. This is a deep truth. Any 'painting' is about those changes, about the relations between the colours, more than about the colours themselves. We can only tell things apart if there are differences. Big or small. Loud or subtle. In shade, in lightness or darkness, in direction, in size, in speed. This whole world is made of differences. Our senses do not detect what is out there, we detect the changes. Consciousness notices the difference between 'things', so there are three involved in our awareness. For that you need to relax your gaze. Not focus on a single point or thing, but see more than one and how they relate. You and that wide focus form a triangle. Try it. Look at two adjacent things and see how they relate, how they transition into one another. Now you discover the rhythm. Light and dark alternate. Always. In steps sometimes, but they go back and forth. A face now becomes a rhythmic pattern of dark and light spots.

Your favourite and you, only have a two-way, fixed line. A stale bond. Disliking is ignoring the obvious relationships altogether.

Humans have developed a dislike for change. A distrust for things that shift. Avoiding change disrupts both our ability to move, to be flexible, to flow, and it has a massive effect on our ecology, our place, our home.

Have you ever noticed the crazy subtle nuances in a landscape. A camera can't catch those. It collapses the enormous range that the naked eye detects. A picture only shows one version of the deeply layered reality. Not just a frozen moment, but just a tiny fraction of that moment. This magical vista is what awaits me when I take a leak early mornings just outside the barn. It tells a new story every day, never to be repeated.

Subtle changes.

Humans do not have a memory for colour. We think we do, but we do not. Only very roughly. Even a skilled painter cannot remember the exact shades of a landscape. We cannot judge or hold a colour without direct reference. We suck at absolute colours.

On the other hand; we excel at seeing tiny differences. We need the triangle to be live to know, to discern, to flow.

We detect subtle changes and delight in them. This is true for the shape of a thigh, a nose, the curving of lips, it is true for the atmosphere of a room shifting, for temperatures rising, for the intonation of a voice, and it is true for colours.

I think harmony is the default state. Not something we create on top, or apart from. Like the pentatonic scale is baked in to our fabric, nature is full of natural harmony. And don't mistake nature for some 'outside'. Everything fits together. Everything is in balance. Everything is sound. Everything is light. Even what we call an unbalance, takes place in perfect harmony.

You might not like the change happening, or the results of change. But that's a different story. Your story. Ours.

I noticed a lot of writing about chaos lately. And they never address the obvious. There is no such thing as actual chaos. Just stuff we judge as chaos. Chaos lies outside this reality. Here order rules. Not the artificial order of us, but the natural order of all things working as one. Of constant change and constant balance.

I think we are here to enjoy the order, the harmony, the full range. Not directly, not full spectrum, not all of it all the time. But fragments, segments, ranges within ranges. The soft touch. The sheltered movements. The relative entering and exiting, the relative darkening and lighting. We are here to enjoy the sunrise and the nightfall. The bright reds and the myriads of greyish colours lurking in the subtle realm. We are here for nuance. We are learning to be in time. Because frequency is about getting the timing right. In time, we will see.

Once we start appreciating nuance, the modern blindness fades. But you can't hold on to the found shades. They move and grow and shift with the speed of light. And you must become very slow to uncover the full depth of field. You must move along in time, change with at the same rate, and then the roar of all parts trembling becomes translucent and offers a growing sphere of peace. A garden, as you will, of tranquility and infinite change and deep harmony. It includes all the tones, all the noise, all the dissonant ones, and each and every colour named or unnamed.

When we make a picture, and I mean this in the broadest sense possible, when we create an image, a drawing, it isn't because we long for an accurate representation of what is out there, of the thing, the other, the landscape, the fact, we do so because it is natural to respond. To express how we see it, how we remember it. To reflect back the light received, to throw shadows. We depict what we are part of. We breathe in and breathe out. We eat, digest and make good shit. We are moved and we add to the movement.

We are ruled by light. Not because we are dark, but because we are related to the light. What is that relationship? You know. You have always known. You are a child of the light. And you are among family. A family so large it might as well be called infinite.

All different. Not a single shade is the same. And forcing them into a single shade on the material level ends up in loss of colour. But if we shift towards appreciating nuances, this big pile of troubled entities suddenly add up to a white unknown. A shimmering living light consisting of all colours.