We respond to colour basically in three ways, which I shall call the visual, the verbal, and the scientific. Although these responses have a common origin in the human

brain - albeit in different parts of it - they are so different that they might be regarded as different languages. Like languages, which are designed to communicate, they also constitute barriers to communication: to such an extent that they often seem to be leading in different directions. We commonly distinguish, for example, between visualizers and verbalizers.

The visual speaks to us directly, evoking emotional responses. It begins very early with the innocent eye of childhood, but psychologists inform us that it is very soon (even by the age of four and a half) overshadowed by the sense of colours as belonging to objects, probably because of the demands for training in practical skills that rely more heavily on shape that colour. It can, of course, be fostered, and there are unprovable suggestions that a strong visual sense of colour is more likely to survive in some tribal communities, and possibly in some that are relatively isolated on islands.

That it can be learnt, or rediscovered, is confirmed by the experience of artists such as Paul Klee, who claimed after a visit to Hammamet in Tunisia with August Macke, that he had discovered colour. He was then aged 34, and his work hitherto had been almost exclusively black and white.

Considering that colour, as paint, is the main material of painters it is perhaps surprising that we tend to describe a few as good colourists. Apart from those few

architect-painters, such as Bruno Taut and Le Corbusier, who were able to demonstrate their interest in colour through their buildings, there are a few painters who have shown a particular interest in the spatial effects of colour. Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square series which began in 1949, provide an important starting point, which has an obvious link with the geometry of architecture. Patrick Heron and Elsworth Kelly are more painterly in their approach.

‘For a very long time now, I have realised that my overriding interest is colour. Colour is both the subject and the means, the form and the content; the image and the meaning, in my painting today … It is obvious that colour is now the only direction in which painting can travel’. (Heron 1962 and 1979)

He was, of course, attacked for making a statement that was philosophically indefensible, but the point of his statement was extremely important, and it has been echoed by many other painters, particularly of the post-war period. It is that colour is the basic material of painting in the same way that solid matter is the basic material of sculpture, a truth that was not at all apparent before the development of abstract art in the 20th century. Through the 1970’s, Patrick Heron demonstrated his beliefs in a series of abstracts juxtaposing organic shapes in brilliant colours, significantly described in such terms as Big Cobalt Violet, Allover Reds, Green and Orange, Emerald with reds and Ceruleum, Orange and Lemon with Small Violet, Emerald Penetrating Reds on Right. The titles are deliberately non-figurative, describing the painter’s colours; and the paintings are striving to come to terms with that other aspect of colour - space.

‘Because painting is exclusively concerned with the seen, as distinct from the known, pictorial space and pictorial colour are virtually synonymous. That is to say, for the human eye there is no space without its colour, and no colour that does not create its own space. When you open your eyes, the texture of the entire visual field … consists of one thing; and that thing is colour. Variations in this colour texture (which sight reveals to us) are indications that form exists: but colour is there first, in that it is the medium through which form is communicated visually. An so, in manipulating colour, painting is organising the very stuff of which sight or vision consists. That space and form can also exist in the dark, as it were, to the scientific mind, I am not denying that. But it is not with abstract concepts of space, on either a molecular or an interstellar scale, that the painter is concerned so much as with those perfectly concrete and physical sensations of space which flood in all the time upon the human retina. And these are sensations of space apprehended in terms of colour.’

(Heron 1979)

Although this may be regarded as very much the painters’ view, it is not at all typical. It can be regarded as typical only with reference to a certain type of painting at this particular period of our cultural development: that is, to abstract painting - painting that is abstracted from the environment. The American Expressionist, Elsworth Kelly, goes further in eliminating not only the frame of the picture, but the background as well. The ‘subject’ is thus reduced (or enhanced) to a set/group of apparently floating geometric shapes of intense colour seen against the white spaces of the gallery. /carefully chosen//. There is a close affinity of /with the mobiles of Alexander Calder/in this. The titles are even more austere than Heron’s: such as Red Curve, Orange Panel, Blue Panel, Yellow Black, Purple Panel with Blue Curve. Kelly’s stated aim… Although architecture window/bridge curve etc. was a starting point… response to photography… that painting could be analogous to music - a language of the eye as music is a language of the ear…

The verbal and the scientific might seem to be much closer to one another, since both rely heavily on verbal concepts; but, as Lewis Wolpert has taken pains to point out, they are very different.

‘Unlike science, everyday common-sense thinking is characterised by its naturalness. It involves complex mental processes of which we are usually quite unaware but which could allow us to deal with the requirements of everyday life…’

(Wolpert 1992)

We know that the grass is green, the sky blue, the clouds white, and that brick houses are red or yellow. But (as we also know) these are only approximations of the normal state of things, conveniently catalogued in our memories so that our senses can be free to receive impressions of more immediate consequence. Bertrand Russell described it as a state of ‘naïve realism’ from which we all begin, believing that things are what they seem. This facility, of colour constancy, along with the constancies of brightness, texture, size, shape and distance, enables us to recognise all kinds of objects and situations that experience has taught us to identify. Edwin Land summarises:

‘the eye has evolved to see the world in unchanging colour, regardless of unpredictable, shifting and uneven illumination.’

(Land 1959)

The predominance of this conceptual or verbal view is well illustrated by the difficulty we have in envisaging colours as anything other that paint (which comes out of tins). Three hundred years after Newton’s discovery that the colours of the rainbow combine to produce white light and that the pigmentation of different surfaces causes them to absorb and reflect coloured light in different ways, we are still preoccupied with the material. We can see that the three primary pigments, red, yellow, and blue can be mixed in pairs to make the secondaries, orange, green and purple, which combine to make ‘neutral’ grey. Why then should we believe the scientific truth that the primaries for light, red, blue and green, should combine to make white light; and is it credible that red and green light should mix to produce the lighter yellow ?

As Wolpert points out, science does no fit our natural expectations. Although it has long been considered (even by scientists) that science is nothing more than trained and organised common sense, he demonstrates the differences. Common sense is far from simple. It is the product of observations and experience of the world which from the basis of rules for dealing with everyday life. It is practical, but it is not necessarily logical. Science is precise, logical, analytical and subject to verification: all qualities which are dissimilar to the qualities usually associated with language. The verbal is rich in variety, regional in its application, evocative and poetic.

The poetry is sometimes overt, as in the cadences of Collonges-la-Rouge and Aachen-rote-Erde. More often it is hidden, as in the ancient green colour verdigris (Vert-de-Grece) produced by hanging copper plates over smouldering vine-leaves; or the medieval yellow, orpiment, made from arsenic trisulphide, and called auripigmentum - gold pigment. Nowhere is the poetry more evocative than in the names of places, our insight into the past.

How aptly the Norsemen named the landmarks as they steered their ships through the channel to Normandy. Cap Grisnez is the Cape of the grey nose; Cap Blancnez - the Cape of the White Nose - is nearby, looking across to the white cliffs of Dover. Cape Verde is the green palm-fringed coast of Senegal. Albion, the ancient name for England used by Pliny (c.AD 77) is derived from the Latin albus, meaning white, possibly referring to the land beyond the white cliffs, which has more ancient roots alb and alp in the Aryan languages, which have given rise to the Alps, and Albania, seen as a long line of snowy mountains from the island of Corfu.

Natural features are the archetypes of the language of colour, forming links between the present and the remote past. Our rivers are red, yellow, black, blue and white; flowing into seas that we call Black, White, Yellow and Red, from hills and mountains that are variously black and white, green and blue, red, yellow and brown. Some descriptions are literal and obvious, some obscure, and some are translated, requiring a knowledge of the geography, geology and natural history of the area. The Adriatic, for example, takes its name from the ancient city called Adria or Hatria in Italy, known as ‘the black town’, probably on account of the black mud on which it was built. The Red Sea is thought to have been named after the reddish-brown spores/debris produced by the primitive alga-like plant which grows at its southern outlet.

Mountains are the most prominent features/natural features, described by the words for white or snow, which, to some extent, are interchangeable. (The Lebanon derives its name from the Hebrew word laban (white), which refers to the Djebel-el-Sheikh mountains, which are snow-covered even in summer.) The Himalayas are ‘the home of the snows’, from the Sanskrit hima (snow) and alaja (abode). More obvious are the etymologies of Mont Blanc, the Sierra Nevada - both in Spain and Mexico, Ben Nevis in Scotland, Snowdon in Wales, Sneehatten in Norway, Sneeuwbergen in the Cape Colony of South Africa, and the two Snaefells in Iceland and the Isle of Man. Similar references to snow occur in Sneekippe, the highest peak of the Riesengebirge, in Sneeberg, Sneekipf and the Eisthalerspitze in the Carpathians; Weisshorn, Weissmies, Dent Blanche and many other peaks in Switzerland. The Jungfrau (or maiden) is perennially clad in a mantle of spotless white.

The opposite quality of blackness is less explicit, referring alternatively either to depth or to the perceived colour of the water. (The ecologically dead depths of the Black Sea might fit the description, but this has not been established. The Celtic dhu (black) has, however, given rise to a number of pools. Dublin is literally ‘the black pool’, and Douglas, in Scotland, the Isle of Man and Lancashire, is the ‘black water’. The Rio Negro in and the river Melas in are both ‘black’ rivers. Whether this effect is due to their depth or the colour of their water is difficult to tell without seeing them, but there is a clear and famous example of ‘coloured’ waters below Passau in Bavariat the confluence of the dark brown Danube, the milky green Inn, and the blackish Ilz flowing out of Bohemia.

More transient than the whiteness of snow and the blackness of water, is the ‘blueness’ of mountains caused by the atmospheric scattering of blue light, called by painters ‘aerial perspective’. The Nilgherries are ‘the blue hills’ of India. There are Blue Mountains in Jamaica and the New South Wales, and Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. The Cairngorms of Scotland and Bengorm in the County Mayo in Ireland both incorporate the Gadhelic/Goedelic word gorm, meaning blue, and Massachusetts is said to be derived from an Indian word meaning ‘blue hills’.

Redness is a common attribution of rocks, soils and rivers. The Sierra Vermeja is ‘the red range’. Redness is an attribute of Crib Coch (from the Welsh coch (red), the peak overlooking the Llanberis Pass in North Wales Monte Rosso, an outlier of the Bernina in Switzerland and the Red Mountain overlooking Aspen in Coloraado. The Rio Colorado also takes its name from the deep red soil through which it flows. Red rocks and soils have also given their names to Ratcliffe near Bristol, to Ratby and Rugby in England, to Aachen-rote-Erde in Germany and Collonges-la-Rouge in France. But the English county of Rutland, formerly rote land (c 1086) is named, not after the red soil, but after the estate of a man called Rota. (c 1060) Patterns of settlement are more precisely defined.

Greenwhich was ‘the green port or harbour’ (from OE grene + wic) and Greenhithe (Kent) nearby, was ‘the green landing place’. Greenford (f. Middlesex) was ‘the green ford’, and Greenstead (Essex) ‘the green pasture’. Apart from major natural features such as snow and white is a common prefix used loosely to refer to rocks: Whitehaven (Cumbria) - the harbour near the white headland; to white (chalk) cultivated land Whitacre in Warwickshite and Whitfield in Kent. Most frequently it is used to refer to man-made features, such as churches, chapels and houses built of stone. Whitchurch (Avon, Hampshire and Shropshire) and Whitechapel (London) refer to churches and chapels; Whitegate (Cheshire) to a white abbey gateway, and Whitby (Yorkshire) to a white village or farmstead. Whitstable in Kent is ‘a white post’, perhaps a boundary marker, or a white mooring post on the river Thames. We are reminded of Baton Rouge, the capital city of Louisiana, named supposedly either after the red posts of the stockade, or a totem pole.

The colour is relative. Portland limestone, which gives a peculiar brightness/sparkle to much of London, including the Tower, St. Pauls, Whitehall and Waterloo Bridge, appears distinctly white against other stones and the characteristic darkness of brick. Also, there are other factors at work. Robert Graves said that ‘The White Hill’, or Tower Hill as it is now called, preserves the memory of Albina, ‘the white goddess’ of the ancient world and Celtic mythology, perpetuated in the castle built by Bishop Gundulf in 1078, which we still call ‘the White Tower’. (Graves 1961/88) Whitehall Palace may have been named after the light stone of the 16th century buildings, but is more likely to be derived from the Tudor custom of naming any hall of festivities a white hall, a reference perhaps to the practice of lime-wax washing the interiors, (Ed. BW/CH. London) (and sometimes painting them with simulated stone courses)

More recent examples of colour-naming include White City in west London, which comprised ‘40 acres of gleaming white-stuccoed buildings and half-a-mile of waterways’ built for the Franco-British Exhibition of 1908. (The complex was subsequently taken over for greyhound racing, football and housing) The architectural writer Kevin Lynch refers to an old, two-storey grey wooden building on a corner in Los Angeles, which has become a landmark by virtue of its uniqueness, earning the name ‘little grey lady’, (Lynch 1960), and much more recently, the young architects of the English New City, Milton Keynes (c. 1970-) dubbed their new office building ‘the yellow peril’ on account of the bright yellow interior.

The description is emotive, saying something about the viewers as well as the colour, and as this was an architects office of the later 20th century in a New Town we may guess that the colour was forceful, potent. This can rarely be said of external colour, except when the effect accidental. For colour usually begins inside. This is because our best colour vision co-incides with our most acute vision given by the minute area of the fovea in the middle of the retina. The colour, typically, leaks out of buildings - our home and public buildings - first to the areas of importance, the door and window surrounds, and then spreads over the facade. The areas of dress, fashion and textiles and interior design are well-served by the colour design professions; architecture scarcely at all. Who is responsible for co-ordination on the large environmental scale.

Bibliography :
Heron P. (1962) A Note on My Painting
Heron P. (1979) The Colour of Colour
Wolpert L. (1992) The Unnatural Nature of Science
Graves R. (1961/88) The White Goddess
Lynch K. (1960) The Image of the City
COLOURSCAPE

Copyright © 1999 Michael Lancaster.