Last weekend we went shopping for colours. I love colour. I always have. A black and white world would be a kind of hell. Colour is what it makes it live.
The colour we found at the weekend came in boxes: 36, 24, 12 colours in a box. We saw colour in tubes, too: fat, squashy tubes of vivid colours, waiting to be squeezed out like toothpaste, blended, merged, mixed, brushed, scraped, textured and slapped on the canvas in 101 tantalising shades. There were small packets of moulding clay in a variety of colours. They are bright and temptingly tactile. They look inviting. I am a child – I want to play!
I am jealous of the artist. I admit it. He sits there mixing, blending, stirring, absorbed in his art, applying personalised colour schemes to his personal creation, recreating life in glowing shades of colour. The results are bold, striking and immediate, jolting me into his personal view of life, showing me what he has seen. He is a lucky man. He has the tools for the job. With just four tubes of paint, he tells me, he can create any colour he needs. We have purchased them from the dark recesses of an artists’ paradise – a treasure trove of pastels and paint boxes, easels and canvases, oils and watercolours. They beckon to us, inviting exploration and experiment, indulging the artist’s own fantasies and dreams. We have chosen carefully: Burnt Umber (not Burnt Sienna), Cadmium Yellow (not Lemon), and a special kind of Crimson. Ultramarine has been discarded in favour of a deep Prussian Blue. It is important to get the details right. The rest will follow.
For me, too, detail is important. But I have no tubes, no boxes, no colour. Yes, there is colour in my imagination – my head is full of it; the brown/yellow/golds of autumn fill my head right now. Leaf shapes and leaf colours, earth textures and earth colour fill my daydreams. But I have only one tool. I can draw simple lines only with my pen. Words are my only medium and the words must tell my story of colour and shape, with textures and shades of meaning, moods and emotions. My words alone must tell the whole story, paint the whole picture, squeeze out the truth and apply it to the page in a multi-coloured spectrum rivalling the artist’s.
Language cannot be mixed in a palette, but careful choices must be made from a vast treasure store, as tantalising to me as the artists’ shops we have visited. My Word Store, as the Anglo-Saxons would have named it, is a huge chamber with dark recesses filled with treasure. It is only important to be accurate. I must learn to choose my words and phrases with infinite care.
Where language fails I must use my imagination, invent, embellish, like a James Joyce or an Edward Lear and add to my personal word store a Jabberwock, a gyre or a gimble. Where words fail me or laborious descriptions produce a ‘dead frog’, faithfully observed and accurately depicted, but lifeless, I will become an Impressionist. I will abandon detail for a while and try to evoke an impression, capture essence or express a feeling or mood. I will approach my subject from every angle and build my meaning layer upon layer like a Cubist. I will dissect my subject and reconstruct it, describing its multi-faceted being from a unique point of view and shedding new light on its objective reality. Braque and Picasso will be proud of me.
I will use my art to its best advantage and transfer the colours of my mind to the limits of the page. I will not be beaten! The artist has inspired in me fresh determination to push the boundaries of my own art. This little pen of mine will yet dispense the glories of the spectrum and pour forth a torrent of literary delights from the Aladdin’s cave of my word store, not that I wish in any sense to be competitive, you understand...
The colour we found at the weekend came in boxes: 36, 24, 12 colours in a box. We saw colour in tubes, too: fat, squashy tubes of vivid colours, waiting to be squeezed out like toothpaste, blended, merged, mixed, brushed, scraped, textured and slapped on the canvas in 101 tantalising shades. There were small packets of moulding clay in a variety of colours. They are bright and temptingly tactile. They look inviting. I am a child – I want to play!
I am jealous of the artist. I admit it. He sits there mixing, blending, stirring, absorbed in his art, applying personalised colour schemes to his personal creation, recreating life in glowing shades of colour. The results are bold, striking and immediate, jolting me into his personal view of life, showing me what he has seen. He is a lucky man. He has the tools for the job. With just four tubes of paint, he tells me, he can create any colour he needs. We have purchased them from the dark recesses of an artists’ paradise – a treasure trove of pastels and paint boxes, easels and canvases, oils and watercolours. They beckon to us, inviting exploration and experiment, indulging the artist’s own fantasies and dreams. We have chosen carefully: Burnt Umber (not Burnt Sienna), Cadmium Yellow (not Lemon), and a special kind of Crimson. Ultramarine has been discarded in favour of a deep Prussian Blue. It is important to get the details right. The rest will follow.
For me, too, detail is important. But I have no tubes, no boxes, no colour. Yes, there is colour in my imagination – my head is full of it; the brown/yellow/golds of autumn fill my head right now. Leaf shapes and leaf colours, earth textures and earth colour fill my daydreams. But I have only one tool. I can draw simple lines only with my pen. Words are my only medium and the words must tell my story of colour and shape, with textures and shades of meaning, moods and emotions. My words alone must tell the whole story, paint the whole picture, squeeze out the truth and apply it to the page in a multi-coloured spectrum rivalling the artist’s.
Language cannot be mixed in a palette, but careful choices must be made from a vast treasure store, as tantalising to me as the artists’ shops we have visited. My Word Store, as the Anglo-Saxons would have named it, is a huge chamber with dark recesses filled with treasure. It is only important to be accurate. I must learn to choose my words and phrases with infinite care.
Where language fails I must use my imagination, invent, embellish, like a James Joyce or an Edward Lear and add to my personal word store a Jabberwock, a gyre or a gimble. Where words fail me or laborious descriptions produce a ‘dead frog’, faithfully observed and accurately depicted, but lifeless, I will become an Impressionist. I will abandon detail for a while and try to evoke an impression, capture essence or express a feeling or mood. I will approach my subject from every angle and build my meaning layer upon layer like a Cubist. I will dissect my subject and reconstruct it, describing its multi-faceted being from a unique point of view and shedding new light on its objective reality. Braque and Picasso will be proud of me.
I will use my art to its best advantage and transfer the colours of my mind to the limits of the page. I will not be beaten! The artist has inspired in me fresh determination to push the boundaries of my own art. This little pen of mine will yet dispense the glories of the spectrum and pour forth a torrent of literary delights from the Aladdin’s cave of my word store, not that I wish in any sense to be competitive, you understand...
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