The Colour Scheme
Getting clean with being dirty...Part III of the colour series
Part I It starts with getting the blues
Part II Dear Permanence
This is turning out to be such a weird series. Trying to catch a gut feeling without going into easy judgements or platitudes. While many people are now at some level aware of us collectively moving into a new era, we desperately want answers. And somehow we have forgotten how to get them. For ourselves I mean. Real personal replies. Not somebody else's answer. Where can we turn to get replies, answers we can rely on? Who is worthy of listening to? Who’s image can we trust?
I sucked at solfège, you know, ear training, discerning intervals, major or minor thirds. But I am good at listening. It took me a while to find out. I am overall good at sensual perception. Not the details. Not the little moves. I am a major arcana kind of guy. A panoramic. That's the reason for this Substack. Sharing how to get an overview. A wide perspective. I do that in a world of high class focusers. Not easy, I can tell you.
This might well be the era of Focus. It's ending. Don't know when, don't know how. But it is ending because it is not enough. Focus sucks at navigating.
Many of you have been taught to focus, trained from an early age to narrow down. But many of you are not natural focusers at all. You're having great trouble feeling at home, at ease with the answers given by the dominant way.
So this is my humble attempt to re-train your vision. My own too, cause teaching is the best way to learn. This is the looking-class. Third lesson.
The white thing.
When talking about colour systems we cannot get around our modern western obsession with white. It worsened the last decades. Are you a white person? Not asking about the colour of your skin. More about your walls and ceilings. Are they just simple white? Or a more snobbish off-white? Some special blend, decided upon after days of deliberation. Oh, the purity of white. What else would you need? Anything else is less. Blemished. Virginity taken by a single touch of whatever is not white, not pure. The highest is a white room, with a white bearded man holding the untouchable blank page.
Too bleak, too blank says the dark hooded rebel. White is too loud. Black is the most full. Containing all. Unbothered by shadows. The perfect touchstone, the ultimate reference. On black all colours shine. Black is the stillness of the perfect record. No noise, all music. Blackness contains the music of the spheres.
Yeah, but hang on, say the painters. Where is the colour in that? Black and white are non-colours. They shouldn't even be included in the colour scheme.
Everyone knows the three primary colours contain all. Buy yourself the three primaries: Blue, Yellow and Red. From there you can mix all you've ever wished for.
I pressingly disagree, the printer said, with your choice of colour. I my trade we use three different shades, those are the purest. Scientifically proven. Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. And, of course, we add black for convenience. I would say four colours do the trick. And white is a given. Not our concern.
Bulshit, the techo responds. My screen and led lights use RGB, to mix millions of superior colours. So, Red, Green and Blue are the three kings. The dark is the baseline. All returns to black without the light of consciousness and electronics.
Then there's the esoteric bunch, claiming seven distinct colours. The rainbow proves it. Symbolism dictates. Seven is the god-given order. ROYGBIV. Red, Orange,Yellow, Green, Bleu, Indigo and on the highest sport of this order's ladder Violet.
Yes, maybe says the sharp observer, but where is magenta in your seven colour spread? I can see Magenta, but its not up there in you magnificent seven. In your rainbow claim. So seven is eight, in fact?
I could go on with nine, or twelve. We adore our special numbers. Or part of us does. The part that needs nice orderly whole real numbers and distinct colours.
And then there was me, selling oil paints that had a range of two hundred and eighty-seven very specific colours.
Who is right? All of the above are right but incomplete. A big theme for humans. Thinking our limited perspective is a full range view.
A recipe for collisions.
We seem to confuse theory with practice. Preferring the idea over reality. I sometimes wonder if becoming an artist is this move from idea to reality. From what we think we see, to what is actually hitting our retina. Or any of our senses for that matter. This is not something you can accomplish but an ongoing ever evolving attitude, a study, a practice. For one, there are no clear boundaries. Yellow moves to red seamlessly, visiting a thousand shades of orange until red is very red and then without a bump that red gets a pinkish purply red wine flavour and then somehow blue has announced its presence. But there is no line between blueish red, and reddish blue. There is no single absolute white either. Only millions of relative whites. Limited by the specific circumstances.
To get a deeper understanding we need to know the interaction of light and matter gives us two perspectives to work from. Opposite viewpoints. And they work together. Nature does that a lot. Opposing forces. We mistake them for conflicts, and fight whatever is opposite.
Matter and purity.
Materials have a certain colour because they emit a bundle of frequencies. Like fire-truck red. If however your fiery red '85 Mustang is dirty, part of the emission is blocked. It looks less bright. The brighter your car, the more you have to instruct your b.... to wash the pod.
If you have red paint, anything you mix in will make that bright pure colour radiate less. It gets dirty. It emits less light, it appears darker. Except when you add white. Then the red gets lighter. But then again the added white looses brightness. And the redness fades. The saturation suffers.
A total loser scenario. That longing for the clean unscratched life. Just no winning there.
The crazy thing is when you balance out all colours and mix them together, you get black. Very difficult in practice, but yeah, you can get close, and produce a lot of grey paint while trying.
Seen from the material side of things the purity is always threatened. Any interaction results in less colour. In a darker result, spoiled and contaminated. We must guard and keep separated. Replace the dull with the shiny. Weigh stuff to see if there is substance. Aim for gold, because it seems to confirm our ideal or heavy inertia. Nothing is gold but gold. Anything else than pure gold must be fought, removed.
Purity and light
When seeing things, we are not primarily dealing with matter, but with light interacting with the physical. At both ends. At the 'source', and in our receptor, our senses that can detect light of different wavelengths. Eyes and skin are light-sensitive. Like the ear hears frequency and loudness, within a certain range.
So, we are dealing with light. A strange invisible energy that only becomes the light as we know it after hitting matter. Light that carries information about that last interaction. Referring to the light-source is misleading here, it is an incredible amount of indistinguishable sources ceaselessly arriving, with the speed of light, and cram-packed full of data. Compared to a fiber optic cable it is wild. The word broadcast would be perfect, but its already taken.
The gap
The painter, painting, manipulates matter to imitate the behaviour of light. The seer does it's very best to make sense of the overwhelm, to reduce it to a package they can handle. Both interpret the incoming. And both fail. Paintings, footage, records, memories are reductions. I can't even imagine the scale of dataloss from live to record. Any record. Some painters know. Some musicians get it. Some physicists understand. But most people have no idea of the gap. Thinking the seven colour theory gets it all.
In my shop I got customers asking for red paint, the colour to depict their beloved '85 Mustang. And I could have sold them the exact can of paint, the original, imported and kept save all those years.
It wouldn't have helped. The last thing you need, to make a painting of a red car, is pure red paint. The last thing you need to paint a nude or a face is skin colour. The last thing you need to paint a gold bar is gold paint. The last thing you need to paint a transparent wine glass, is transparent glass paint.
You could even combine the nude and the car in one knee-weakening mural that left nothing to the imagination and not use colour at all. To see and recognise things we only need to imitate the light. There are only two ways to do that.
You either move from dark to light, or from light to dark. Moving from one thing to the next you establish the difference in tone. The relative tone. Nothing more nothing less.
Like in music. You either go up or down. And get the interval right.
Colour is overrated. Is secondary.
It's the light that leads.
To a painter (and in some sense we are all painters) trying to catch a scene, grab an image, the only thing that makes or breaks that picture is light. Not colour, but the relative values of dark and light. The tone, not the teint, decides. The melody not the instrument.
That's what gives us the what of what we see.
Colours add the how. The extra info. Not the essence. It's the icing, not the cake.
What happens if you add red light to green light?
Some of you might know the answer. But most will not have a clue. Think about it for a second.
Well, I already said light does the opposite of matter when mixing. When you mix red and green paint the result is darker, it is a reduction. Not one of the happy colours.
When you mix light you add more range. More frequencies. It gets lighter. It is additive mixing. But what colour is the result of mixing red and green light?
The rainbow tells us. Because the transition from the red bit to the green bit contains both frequencies. The result is yellow.
And what is in between green and blue? When adding green light to blue light? It is the least known blue, but the most important one. It is cyan.
And here comes the weirdest. The rainbow is the spectrum of light, right? It starts with red, and ends with violet. There is no in between red and violet out there, because they are at either end. No in theory you are right, but our eye disagrees. In practice it compares red and violet and says, this is magenta.
That's why we have colour circles. To connect beginning and end. Because we do. We make circles. We are circle-makers. We are the ones concluding, that todays sun is the same as the one we remember from yesterday. Convenient, but not true.
Magenta exposes a slight problem. What wavelength does that non-existing colour have?
Well none of the colours we distinguish have one wavelength anyway. Sorry, no purity available. We just have made up names for certain bundles. High levels of red and blue and no green, we call magenta. High levels of green and blue, no red in sight gives us what we recognise as cyan. Convenient, not true.
Purity and light have a very different relationship. White light contains all colours. The more the merrier. Pure white light is only reached when nothing is left out. Shine on you crazy diamond and remove the nude dude from the hood before you go for a drive in your dirty '85 Mustang. Can you see how different this us from our outdated fascist ideas on purity? Losing part of the spectrum makes the whole less pure.
Back to synthetic colours. The pinnacle of purity. Ultramarine, Quinacridone, Dioxazine, Naphtol, Benzimidazolone and many more colourful names give us an unprecedented range bright and pure. Don't get me wrong, they are marvels. Fantastic, unbelievable additions to the palette. To the material spectrum.
They are not goals. Not the highest form. Not progress. If anything they make the job harder. Like we have doubled the number of keys on the piano. Adding a hundred coloured keys to the black and white. And we're stuck with the same ten fingers.
Natural pigments had the 'disadvantage' of impurities. Even the best Lapis Lazuli Ultramarine seems dull compared to its synthetic 'superior'. No earth colour ever wins the brightness contest from any of the azo's or the cadmium's.
There is a catch though. A painting with just synthetic colours, despite the clever mixing, and choice of subject is kinda boring.
Pyrrole red is freaking amazing red. Nothing is as red as Pyrrole. But....like all synthetics, it consists of the exact same molecule through and through. Little clones. It is pure. And it emits almost a single frequency. A very narrow band of light. That bombardement of repetition makes us yawn. It is poor at transporting complex information. Natural greys, shitty browns, filthy greens, muddled hazes and the hazed muddy ones excel at that. They tell stories of what really happened. Yes synthetics give us a few hundred new colours. Sensational at first glance, but the eye starts recognising them pretty fast. Oh, it's you again. Same old story? Don't you have anything else to offer?
A screen with a few thousand colours is sacked by our sensitive eyes. We need, long for, millions upon millions of different shades. Why? We are spoiled by nature with a million years of 'impurity'. Of endless upon endless variation. Of each tiny, tiny shade telling us something new, something specific. About an impending disease, or fertility, or edibility, or if it might be poisonous, on how fresh it is, on what season, what time of day, or night, light is telling us stories with such incredible depth. We drink light to navigate, to interact. And calling blue, simply bleu does not suffice. To make it as pure as we can, does not mean we have added new light, that we now have more light than yesterday.
We seem to live in a black and white era. In an red or blue choice sort of habitat. And with gaining range of colour we have lost the power to see. It is as if we lead a theoretical life. We got puritanned, colour schemed. We accept fake white. The illusion of wealth. We’re being sold empty copies. Can you still see the difference? Do you live a live lead by theory, or are you rooted in the practical? Can you see the real colour of what and who surrounds you? Look, see, you are surrounded by originals.
Yes, seeing is a power. And it is a skill. It is the skill of nuance. Next weeks realm. Happy painting!
Season 3 is well on it’s way. A woman artist is travelling solo on a bike in the 1950’s. What she encounters on this strange journey is gathered in a picture book called The Castle Of The Naked Knights. It will have an impact that takes a hundred years to unfold.
If you are a panoramic who loves the wide scope of long form storytelling, then this is for you. It combines adventure, plot driven visual writing, with lots of character development. It avoids classic hero themes, genre confinement and bad guy stereotypes. It is shaped like a slow crescendo. No telling what will happen to you if you decide to enter…..
This weeks chapter, is one of my favourites and can be read separately without spoiling too much….
The tone, not the teint, decides. The melody not the instrument. Losing part of the spectrum makes the whole less pure! I need something more grand than an exclamation point here!
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