Colour

 

Sometimes we stop to notice how our entire existences are lived in and against vast expanses of colour. Their continuity is so permanent we trust them as we would any reliable consistency in our lives. It seems obvious, not platitudinous, to say blue is something we can rely on about sky. Its oceanic reflection is usually paler than any blue the oceans have to offer, deep water being somewhere none of us gaze in too long. Certainly not as long as the time we spend unthinkingly gazing at its spatial reflection in atmosphere, the ‘overarching’ sky. No one is unaware of the predominance of green across the Earth. The amount of green is incalculable used by artists in representations of green in landscapes, so much taken for granted that no one pays much attention to all the green generations of artists have attentively applied with the purpose of showing the Earth. Green rises up out of pure watery coastline, ranges inland fairly much in every direction. It’s the field colour of forests, plains, the avenues. The eyes rest easily and familiarly as green inches into view or, more typically, commands visual space. Though we don’t look at green like this normally, as if landscape were an artwork, green is the complete demonstration of how light and water took over the world, long before colour names. We sometimes consider the main colour of our urban environments, concluding again green is consistently present. Cities vary in associations. Siena is red-brown amidst Italian forests. Paris off-white, notwithstanding its parks and gardens. New York may be silver, even if it’s actually grey. It’s at night that urban areas awake to rivers of silver and white and other luminous variations, curving out across contours of their own special geography. In the days when plane flight was common, these sights were universal in the darkness, coming down out of the conquered heights to something approaching normal, again. Black, in fact, is the vast expanse we find ourselves in at night, whatever the background glow of our favourite cities. The colour that is no colour reminds us of the places beyond the reaches of sunlight. Such blackness is more like the norm, or so it seems, than the rainbow of Earth that meets us each morning. Black, even darker than the bushland at night, than imagined in our halcyon cities of haloed midnight. We try to imagine the darkness of remote spaces seen by the naked eye at night, with black to go by as a chart. And the forces of light that natural stars hundred times larger than our own must emit across their extended systems of turning planets. Anyway, we also have red fields as that same sun goes again behind horizon, overturnering Turner in multiple shades. And there is morning, a glow aglow, a golden burst made of star, that no artist can reproduce, its iconic light.