This workshop explored how we can see the world in colour and light, in a way that we can see when we explore paintings or read about particular artists and how they experience the world and seek to capture or represent it in their work.
We began with a poem by the contemporary poet Marge Piercy called ‘Colors Passing Through Us’, which you can read in full here. The evocative descriptions of ‘the stain blackberries leave’, the colour of ‘Blue as shadows on new snow’, and the ‘green of cos lettuce upright’ brought back lots of memories.
We then read a briliant and quite well-known poem published in 1918 by Marianne Moore (b.1887), entitled ‘The Fish‘ and beginning ‘wade through black jade’ and goes on to describe ‘crow-blue mussel-shells’ and the ‘submerged shafts of the sun,/ split like spun glass’, ‘illuminating the turquoise sea’.
Finally we thought about the Victorian artist and critic John Ruskin who wrote extensively and brilliantly about colour and said of himself: ‘It is true that I see colour better than most people’. It is also the case that he was extremely attentive and observant and thus able to identify gradations and nuance in minute detail and with evident enjoyment. The practice of such looking he thought was something that children often do naturally but which needs to be cultivated in later life to retain it. It was really interesting to think ourselves about how we see and why this might be.
For example, here are some of his observations:
‘. . . the white [is] precious . . . when white is well managed, it ought to be strangely delicious – tender as well as bright – like inlaid mother of pearl, or white roses washed in milk. The eye ought to see it for rest, brilliant though it may be; and to feel it as a space of strange, heavenly paleness in the midst of the flushing of the colours.’
‘No colour harmony is of high order unless it involves indescribable tints. It is the best possible sign of a colour when nobody who sees it knows what to call it, or how to give an idea of it to anyone else. Even among simple hues the most valuable are those which cannot be defined: the most precious purples will look brown beside pure purple and purple beside pure brown; and the most precious green will be called blue if seen beside pure green, and green if seen beside pure blue.’
(from, The Elements of Drawing)
These quotations and more examples and information can be found via the Ruskin Museum webpages.
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