4
The plunge into colour

Colour in painting had been a subject which for years I had been quite unable to think about. It was as if it had been so important that to think about it, to know just what one was trying to do with one’s paints, had been to risk losing something; it seemed at first glance as if an experience so intimate and vital must be kept remote and safe from the cold white light of consciousness which might destroy its glories. In fact it was as if colour and the light of knowing were differences which must be kept firmly separate, just as objects had to be kept separated and not seen in their mutual effect upon each other. So, up to now I had used paint blindly and the results had only on rare occasions been satisfactory.

When I did eventually arrive at trying to learn something about the deliberate use of colour it was again after attempting to follow instructions from the books. For instance, I read that in order to learn how to manage paint it was best to begin with a still-life; two objects were to be arranged against a simple background and to be drawn in a heavy line with brush and Indian ink. But when I had tried a still-life of this kind there was nothing in the result to suggest that it had been worth doing; and when, instead of trying to follow instructions, I set about observing what the eye liked, in the way of colour experiences, the result was a quite opposite conclusion about the way to use colour.

These observations about colour began when, on looking through some earlier attempts at landscape, I noticed that the only glimmer of interest came where there was a transition of colour; for instance, where the yellow lichen on a barn roof had tempted me into letting the yellows and reds merge, unprotected by any felt division, so that you could not say exactly where one colour began and another ended. Also I noticed that a smear of paint left on the palette after painting, where white merged into red, blue, brown, was interesting and alive; whereas the picture painted with the same colours but carefully separated by felt lines was dead. And another hint had come from looking at a roof painted with a tiny streak of blue in the shadow. There had certainly been no blue in the colour of the actual roof; yet this touch of a colour that was not there was the most vital thing in the picture. After noticing this fact I forgot it again; but some time later, having decided that the old sketches were not worth preserving so they might as well be used for experiments, I had taken one of a church and begun to repaint it, choosing the colours without any thought of how the tower and trees and roof had looked at that particular place on that particular day. When it was finished the light, which in the original version had been an attempt to take into account the actual position of the sun on an afternoon in August, now glowed up from the ground at the foot of the church tower in a quite impossible manner, it spread warm colours over the grey stone that had never been there at all. Then I had tried freely painting over another sketch, one of a village with a haystack in the foreground; and the result was that the original lamely copied yellow of the haystack lit by pale September sun had become something on fire from within with colour that spread up over the whole village.

In both these re-paintings the light seemed to come from the earth rather than from the sky, and the colour also flooded up from the earth, once it was let loose from bondage to natural appearance and outline.

This feeling of colour as something moving and alive in its own right, not fixed and flat and bound like the colouring of a map, grew gradually stronger. Again and again it happened that when I closed my eyes and tried to recall colour combinations seen in nature, the memory did grow and glow and develop in the most surprising way. So here was a meeting of the conscious inner eye and the blind experience of colour which resulted from the willingness to watch and wait. And it was a meeting which neither destroyed the dark possibilities of colour nor dimmed the light of consciousness; in fact it produced a new and vital whole between them, and one which seemed to glow up from the depths of one’s existence, like the light in my sketches which had flooded up from the earth. But in spite of this discovery I still found it very difficult to achieve this watching and waiting, part of my mind still wanted to keep colour firmly within boundaries and staying the same.

Here also were certainly two different ways of feeling about experience. One way had to do with a common sense world of objects separated by outline, keeping themselves to themselves and staying the same, the other had to do with a world of change, of continual development and process, one in which there was no sharp line between one state and the next, as there is no fixed boundary between twilight and darkness but only a gradual merging of the one into the other. But though I could know, in retrospect, that the changing world seemed nearer the true quality of experience, to give oneself to this knowledge seemed like taking some dangerous plunge; to part of my mind the changing world seemed near to a mad one and the fixed world the only sanity. And this idea of there being no fixed outline, no boundary between one state and another, also introduced the idea of no boundary between one self and another self, it brought in the idea of one personality merging with another. Here I could not help remembering what Cézanne is reported to have said about looking at a picture:

This idea of the very eye which sees being lost, drowned in the flood of colour, sounded all right, as long as it was a coloured state of grace and one did rise again. But supposing one did not? And supposing that it was not a picture but a person that was loved like this? As yet I could not see very far along this way, but later it was to become clear that some of the foreboded dangers of this plunge into colour experience were to do with fears of embracing, becoming one with, something infinitely suffering, fears of plunging into a sea of pain in which both could become drowned. At present, however, I only knew that there was some unknown fear to be encountered in this matter of colour and the plunge into full imaginative experience of it.

Persistent following up of any clue to what the eye liked had then led to this: to having to face the fact of a warmth and a glow and a delight flooding up from within, dictated by no external copy but existing and developing and changing in its own right, as a result of one’s own awareness of the developing relation between oneself and what one was looking at. But at the same time the dispensing with an external copy brought dangers of its own. Certainly it seemed that as long as one is content to live amongst the accepted realities of the common sense world, the fear of losing one’s hold on the solid earth may remain unrecognised; but that as soon as one tries to use one’s imagination, to see with the inner as well as with the outer eye, then it may have to be faced. I say ‘may’ because obviously there are some people for whom ventures into the world of imagination are not beset with dangers, or, at least, not always. I remembered Bunyan’s description of the valley of the Shadow of Death, how some saw in it:

While Faithful’s report was that for him the sun had shone all the way.