Can we consider colours as purely subjective forces?
From the Spring 2017 issue of RA Magazine, issued quarterly to Friends of the RA.
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Artist Emyr Williams argues that colours are objective forces that can create a unified whole in painting.
Jackson Pollock once said: “The problems of contemporary painting are independent of any one country”. The same goes for colour in painting, which is neither sociologically determined nor culturally dependent.
Paintings constructed through colour are capable of such surprising and unforeseen visual delight, transcending the mechanics of their making. This “beyondness” is only possible when the artist is disinterested in colour to the point that it serves a greater purpose than the office of taste-making. I am not talking here about systematically made optical art. Colour can build the perception of a haptic, perceived space when the execution is spontaneous. It’s about working in the moment and reacting to the colour as the work takes shape.
Matisse’s great “Vence interiors” from the late 1940s are paintings that have achieved this particular state of gestalt. His organisation, of what are essentially primary and secondary colours, is such that the surfaces seem to glow.
Colours and their juxtapositions operate here as forces which, although seemingly in competition with one another, somehow unify into a summative whole, generating pictorial light and opening out space to us in a heady, palpable way. Using colour as a fact of pigment quality rather than cultural association, and finding expression by the control of its facture, is to bear down on the objective reality of what colour is and can be. Furthermore, to produce art with this ambition invites an interrogation of how we relate to colour in our wider lives.
For an artist wishing to use colour with such an intent, considerations of extrinsic colour association are weights, not levers. People can experience colour differently due to physical anomalies, but cultural biases can become restrictive and even produce schisms. We must search for content in our art forms that avoids courting the subjective interpretation of imposed narratives.
Cultures respond to colour in their own unique ways. Lifestyle, belief systems, valuation of materials, pigment scarcity – all these have affected peoples’ regard for, and judgement of, colour. But does this pragmatism turn us into prisoners of subjectivity, desperately looking for an affirmation of our relationship to colour?
Colour, revealed through visible light reflected upon a surface, is a minuscule percentage of the electromagnetic spectrum. This tiny fraction of reality is what we see. Why muddy the purity of this reality by seeking to trap it in the habitual?
Clichés such as ‘dark colours are serious’ and ‘primaries are frivolous’ almost compel us to be ashamed of any meaningful engagement with colour. If we wish to search for the universal, then we have to get beyond the local.
There is an old saying: a three-legged stool finds its level. The three primary colours are the building blocks of a palette. When I am painting, any applied colour will compete with an existing or subsequent hue. To put these three primaries into a work and unify them is a great challenge. I find it useful to think of any colour with the word ‘a’ in front of it. So it would be ‘a red’ instead of just ‘red’, raising a question of how should I temper or tune this red and what consequences of using it thus could I discover. I am looking for conflict repeatedly, and strategies emerge to deal with these conflicts as I paint.
Painting forces me to look at colour with a curious scrutiny, one which feels like I am looking at something external to myself. When I see colour in this way it gives me something to believe in. It doesn’t feel like it comes from me, though – I am searching constantly… objectively.