Anam Cara

The presence and experience of colour is at the very heart of human life. In a sense, we are created for a life full of colour. It is no accident that we abandon the world when the colours vanish and the reign of darkness commences. Night is the land where all the outer colours sleep. We awaken and return to the world when the colours return at dawn. There is a beautiful word in Irish for this: luisne – the first blush of light before dawn breaks. Gradually, the coloured horizon of dawn gives way to daylight.

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WE TAKE DAYLIGHT FOR GRANTED. YET DAYLIGHT IS NOT SIMPLY there; it is an event, a smooth all-pervasive happening. Daylight is created light, a light woven seamlessly from a whole series of colours. The unnoticed miracle of everyday light is exposed in the rainbow, an apparition that is both illusory and tenuous. Conamara is a landscape beloved of rainbows. Between the rich light and the frequent rains, rainbows love to appear here. Every rainbow is a revelation: the optic through water drops that separates seamless daylight to reveal and display the secret inlay of colours that dwell at the heart of ordinary light.

In a sense, one could speak of the secret life of colour. Despite its outward beckoning, like true beauty, colour is immensely hesitant in giving away its secrets. Painters learn to respect the hesitancy of colour and endeavour to refine their skill to become worthy of its revelations. A painter learns the language of colour slowly. As in learning any language, you struggle for a long time outside the language. There is a willed deliberateness to how you sequence the strange words to make a sentence. Then one day the language lets you in to where the words dance to your thoughts with ease and fluency. Perhaps for a painter, too, there is a day when colour lets him in, when his palette sings with synergy and delight. For the artist Paul Klee that day happened during a trip to Tunisia in 1914. He wrote: ‘Colour possesses me. I don’t have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour. Colour and I are one. I am a painter.’

The attempt to understand and explain colour has always fascinated the human mind. In classical times Aristotle’s theory held that colour belonged objectively to things. This understanding held sway until the seventeenth century. One day in his room, a young Isaac Newton was experimenting with light. He placed a prism against the light ray coming through his window and noticed how the prism split the white light into its constituent colours. The genius of his intuition inspired him to place a second prism upside down in the path of the diverse colours. In that moment the colours coalesced again into a seamless white light. Newton concluded that colour is generated by subjective perception and vision. For Aristotle, light awakened colour. For the medieval mind, light was the vehicle of colour. But for Newton light is colour.

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COLOUR HAS ALWAYS INTRIGUED ME AND IN RESEARCHING THIS book I found great delight in learning about colour, what it actually is and how it comes about. We need to sketch in some simple physics in order to illuminate this. Colour is not a cloak worn by an object; each colour is generated and shows the vulnerability of an object: its Being-Seen-ness. One of the great illusions of human vision is that there is stillness, yet what seems still to our eyes is in fact never still. The whole physical world is in a state of permanent vibration and change. Each object is constantly astir. The physical world is an electromagnetic field. Each thing is deftly aflow in the play of energy, namely, electromagnetic waves. The waves flow in different frequencies. Our eyes only pick up a small section of this vibrating wave-world: this is what we call visible light. What we see, we see in light; yet what we see is always partial, a selection from the full spectrum of what is there but not visible to us. There is a real world of invisible light here around us but we cannot see it. Though we feel at home and sure in the visible world, it is in truth a limited place. Visible light comprises only one-tenth of the whole light spectrum. When we see the whole flow of visible light together, it is white.