That Divine Indigo May Only Last a Few Seconds.
I have been reading Will Hubbard over on This Recording.wordpress.com who admires poets and writers from The Fifties. He seems quite taken with the work of Franz Kline who often works with just black inky paint on soft paper, using a fat brush
in a calligraphic and narrative way. His paintings seem like journalistic records of energetic standing up gestures. Not sitting down anyway. A lot of the American Abstract Expressonists seem to have worked like that. Almost like they are dancing into the canvas. The Englishwoman Bridget Reilly is a good example of a sitting down painter, although in reality it is a minion physically doing the actual painting which she “designs”. Kline wouldn’t have been able to outsource his work in the same way. Although it might have been possible for Jackson Pollock.
When I first went to Art School in the mid sixties, one of the first exercises we did, was an examination of black and white. An idea I purloined wholesale when I became a teacher. We were asked to make a ‘collection’ of found blacks and mix some ourselves, in various mediums. It was a bit of a revelation for me, realising just how many different blacks there are for gods sake. For example juxtapose a graphite pencil powdery smudge with the patent leather of acrylic black varnish. Vive la difference.
With the whites it was a case of even more so, because the default background of most stuff is white. Robert Ryman has a whole room of white on white paintings
at the Guggenheim if you want to look at some examples. They dont work well in a photo though or being talked about.
Oliver Sacks in his Book The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, talks about a head injury patient who was a painter. This man lost all sense of colour and just saw in B&W and worked that way for several years. After an operation his colour sense was recovered, but he had developed such a love of the tonal greys that never used colour again. Or maybe just a tiny little bit, like in the movie Rumblefish. Oliver Sacks has to be the coolest 74 year old on the planet. Here is a an interview with him in WIRED, where he talks about taking a mountain of drugs in his youth and imagining a divine indigo. His colour, the colour he still strives to see again.
My mind wandered on to this subject because I woke in the night with a eureka moment. It resolved a nagging problem. I had been wondering what colour to make a patch of sky on a piece of work. The painting of Mount Edgcumbe was set in late autumn last year, because that is when I did the initial drawing. Last night was The National Fireworks Competition here in Plymouth Harbour which experience somehow snatched the right colour back out of the archive in my brain. It was the sound like a crackling bonfire as a rocket went up, that did it.
Maybe it’s because I am an air-sign that I loooove fireworks so much. They are the greatest but most ethereal artform. Many years ago I witnessed an International Competition over several nights in Cannes with Italian and Chinese contenders. Yes superb, but I have heard that The Japanese are the best firework makers.
Think of the way food is presented in Japan, well it is the same with their fireworks. They know how to arrange things on the plate or in the sky. The colour range is delicate but zingy. Down below are amateur videos illustrating my point. There are some awesome examples of true artistry. Look out for that divine indigo! I am looking to use a dash of it in my funeral firework.
