Anam Cara

While music and its voices sound out the depths of silence and delight our listening, colour calls forth the secrets of darkness and light to bring joy to the eye.

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Most people don’t look . . .

The gaze that pierces – few have it –

What does the gaze pierce?

The question mark.

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON

COLOUR IS THE LANGUAGE OF LIGHT; IT ADORNS THE EARTH with beauty. Through colour light brings its passion, kindness and imagination to all things: pink to granite, green to leaves, blue to ocean, yellow to dawn. Light is not simply a functional brightness that clears space for visibility. Perhaps of all the elements, light has the most refined imagination; it is never merely a medium. Light is the greatest unnoticed force of transfiguration in the world: it literally alters everything it touches and through colour dresses nature to delight, befriend, inspire and shelter us. The miracle of colour is a testament to the diverse, precise and ever surprising beauty of the primal imagination. The intense passion of the first artist glows forth in the rich colours of creation. In this sense, colour is the visual Eucharist of things. In a world without colour, it would be impossible to imagine beauty; for colour and beauty are sisters. As Goethe said: the eye needs colour as much as it needs light.

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MY EARLIEST MEMORIES ARE OF THE LANDSCAPE OF THE BURREN IN the West of Ireland. The Burren is an ancient kingdom of limestone sculptures carved slowly by rain, wind and time. Limestone is a living stone. Everywhere light conspires to invest these stone shapes with nuance. When rain comes, the whole stonescape turns blue-black. Rain has artistic permission here that it could enjoy in no other landscape. Mostly invisible and quickly absorbed by the earth, rain achieves powerful visibility on the vast limestone pavements. Like an artist who has fallen into despair, it drenches the grey stone with gleaming black. Everywhere the stone drinks in blackness as though it secretly corresponded to its inner mind. Then the rain ceases and the sun returns; the light effects a complete transfiguration. Gradually the dark dries off and the stonescape literally resurrects, glistening with washed whiteness, a reminder that this stone world once lived on the ocean floor.

Winter always makes the Burren more severe. The ameliorating green of trees and grasses diminishes in cold paleness. As the grip of winter loosens, the landscape gradually returns from bleakness to the welcome of exotic spring flowers which have an unexpected home here. The Burren is famous for its rare alpine and arctic flora and gradually amidst the grey stonescape, these delicate flowers creep forth in subtle sacraments of colour. Profusions of gentian surface like blue stars, white and purple orchids rise to offer their quiet grandeur to view, mountain avens with their white and yellow countenances make the stone seem kind. In crowds the harebells test their deft blueness against the breeze. Rich orange, yellow lichens come to cover the white limestone bearing beautiful names like Sea Ivory, Tar Lichen, Orange Sea Lichen and Common Orange Lichen. And perhaps most striking of all, the Bloody Cranesbill rises in its delicate crimson petals and white heart through the scailps (crevices) in the limestone.

As a child I often watched a local blacksmith at work. He would place the silver horseshoes into a black, coal-dust fire to redden them. Under the fierce breath of the bellows the mound of black dust was an instant furnace of redness. Perhaps, similarly the very breath of life breathes into things until their individual colours flame. Such is the generosity of air, self-effacing and unseen it asks nothing of the eye, yet it offers life to the invisible fields where light can unfold its scriptures of colour. We dwell between the air and the earth, guests of that middle kingdom where light and colour embrace.

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ONCE WHILE TRAVELLING IN CHINA I WAS ON MY WAY TO Shanghai Airport. It was a dull morning. The road, suburbs and landscape were grey and colourless. Even the track and trek of commuters seemed like some underworld parade. It began to rain in slanted layers. Then I noticed a cyclist coming towards me. Attached to the back of his bicycle was a large basket piled high with balls of wool in every colour you could imagine. This determined cyclist was like a traveller from another world who transfigured the whole grey suburban landscape with his gentle cargo of blues, yellows, greens, indigos, oranges, purples and ochres.