In the beginning, in the ancient world, there were three words for the basic three colors: black, white, and red. Black and white did not mean only black and white; black and white stood for light and dark. And without their own names, colors were subsumed under the rubric of black and white. It is hard to imagine for us, perhaps, how to get by without any color names but these three. In fact, Gladstone, the 19th century British minister who was also a Greek scholar, was convinced that the Greeks did not see any colors but the ones that they could name (sic!). But blue was often conflated with dark (hence, the “wine-dark sea” of Homer) ; and yellow and gold found their places under white.
For many folks, black is black and white is white, and there is an end to it. But for those of us who make our living or live our lives with color, nothing is so black or white. Black and white are like the idea of absolute zero; it is an idea, but in the real world it doesn’t really exist (or we can’t actually get to it!). There is no absolute black or white. We are aware of what black color or what white color it is; in essence, what cast the black or white has.
Some of this high sensitivity to color, I believe, is the result of a couple of generations of Western capitalism. We are used to having a wide variety of colors to choose from in all our products from make-up to house paints to art supplies and so on. White and black are seen today as colors. White, especially, because it is an important color in house paints, papers, and clothing, comes in all sorts of casts. The white that is used most often up here in the North is a white with a yellow cast: a warm white. Decorator’s white is a much bluer color.
Black has also as many casts as there are hues. Ad Reinhardt, the twentieth century abstract artist, painted a series of black canvases that appeared totally black on first glance. However, when viewed over time, the canvases resolved themselves into black squares of various casts: blue-blacks, red-blacks, green-blacks, etc. The effect was rather like listening to a beautiful melody sung in a very very deep basso profundo.
We live in a very colorized society. The idea that color can be separated from the colored object doesn’t seem strange to us; we are all familiar with color chips representing our choices in everything from iPads to appliances. But there are still places in the world where a thing’s color can not be imagined except embedded in that thing. It is a way of looking at color that is very anchored in the physical world.
However, it was not just commodification that dislodged color from object. Abstraction and modernism made the connection between color and form much more arbitrary. I wonder if Kandinsky, who was one of the fathers of abstract painting, did not become uncomfortable at that final dissolution of color and its tie to the real world, and that is why he tried so hard at the end to create rules about which colors should go into which forms? But more on that in next week’s blog!
Color action: make two more collections of the widest range you can find of white and black. (My guess is that there will be more white color samples than black available!)
All my best wishes for a happy, healthy, and colorful New Year!
realm of color 