LIVING COLOURS.

On Wed, February 26, 2014, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

Aah !...(sigh). Colour ! What a relief, a nice apolitical subject.

Though a lot of people still don't think so. But never mind, Nero, while Rome burns i'm fiddling with living colours.

The fiddler in this case is not on a roof, but only on a palette. A palette is any bit of cardboard i can find in the house without destroying the function of a box. Milk cartons unboxed make good palettes though. Waterproof too.

Living colours. That's my answer to the question; "Lifetime's usual occupation?"

Funny how palettes are ignored and not valued, as being of insignificance in contrast to the finished artwork. I've never heard of an exhibition of famous palettes.

(After completing this article i went to the internet and typed, 'famous artists' palettes' and found that not to be the case. There's photos of lots of them. They give a sense of how each artist typically applied the brush to a surface.)

Imagine a prized collection including for example, the palette of Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers', or 'Wheatfield with crows'. He probably lit the fire with them in the autumn, i don't think it was his last painting.

Or the palette of La Gioconda / Mona Lisa. He might have used it to block up a mouse hole, who knows? Though traditional palettes already had a hole for the thumb, and they used to clean them after use, like you'd clean a plate.

People assume palettes to be relatively irrelevant or secondary. Like floor cloths or pot scrubbers, just because you throw them away. When really you'd be lost without them.

Like not having a plate to eat off.

As for 'secondary', they're obviously primary, secondary, and tertiary, and all shades, tones, hues, and tints in between.

As for irrelevant, on the contrary. They're fascinating. After all, that's where a primary part of the concentrated focus goes on. It's a very precise business mixing a colour.

Of equal importance, the 'tone' has to be exact, and i mean exact to the finest possible degree. Like fine-tuning an instrument to concert pitch.

Unless of course, you're a masochist who feels more at home with disharmony and discomfort in dystopia.

But palettes can be beautiful in themselves, due to the focus of discernment that's gone into them. Combined with the absence of concern for conscious imagery. Which allows subconscious imagery to emerge by itself.

It's good for the creative imagination to be able to read into such amorphous clues.

A blob is not 'just a blob.' Even if it fell on the floor. It's no less of an interesting natural phenomenon just because you curse it for being in the wrong place and call it a fracking mess. That's just apartheid, the right colour in the wrong place.

The significance of 'art' is not that you just faked an illusion of appearance. It's that you didn't fake or contrive anything, but somehow managed to allow the natural beauty of the substance itself, to manifest without mangling it in the process.

Pigment is magical stuff, with the potential to embody the lowest and the highest expression of what we may feel or aspire to. The palette is the micro arena of primal alchemy.

No matter if it's cardboard, a mysteriously versatile and useful material in itself. You'd wonder how it came from a tree. I suppose they scrunch it up a bit and turn it into a pancake.

Van Gogh painted on cardboard too. He wasn't on a pension or even in one, so you'd hardly judge him. A lot of people live in cardboard boxes, usually without space for a partner. A housing crisis causes a lot of people to flip their lid.

But the point is, living colour. You have to live it for the joy of life to come alive in it and enliven it. Breathe the breath of life into it. It's a kind and generous thing to be doing. It's also therapeutic for emotional and spiritual welbeing, refinement of the evolution of perception.

When you take more than just an extended chronological moment to look into it, you may even be amazed by what appears. You can see images in clouds but why stop there? You can see whatever you wish, anywhere. In trees, earth, water, walls, dirt, especially random arrangements of paint.

Precisely because what's there is uncontrived.

It's a matter of connecting the dots, and dashes, in 'the mind's eye.' So together they constitute the image of your imagined focus, and ignore what doesn't fit.

Artists do that. Leonardo did that. Children do that, and we're all children, and artists if we do that. So we can afford to be innocent, you don't lose anything. Shamans and medicine people do it and call it 'second attention.'

Attention being the only thing you have to pay. The rest is free.

That amazing, ever curious, pianist, writer and innovative wise scientist, Ervin Laszlo, founder of 'The Budapest Institute', has revealed and demonstrated that this faculty is the larger part of our being. Not officially recognized until now. Our deeper self which transcends time and space.

So what's to be said about colour? Nothing.

Because anything that's not already apparent is beyond words anyway. Simply looking saves a lot of unnecessary breathing. The slower you breathe, the brighter and clearer the colours, and you feel them more. Colour meditation.

It does help though, to know exactly which colours complement one another on the colour wheel. It's a circular rainbow with complementary colours opposite one another like numbers on a clock. Precise harmonies compliment each other, they're setting us a good example.

The primaries, red, yellow, and blue,

any pairs of which, when mixed make

secondaries (so called), orange, green, and purple.

When you mix pairs of them,

you get tertiaries, earth tones and colour greys, and so on into neutrality. Amazing !

A principle i picked up in art school, (not the Principal); If you take any pair of complementaries, say, red and green. Make them the same TONE (as in lighter and darker).

Such that if you took a black and white photo they'd look identical. Put them side by side so they contact. What you'd call intimate relationship.

The closer in tone, the more they flash and flicker. Understandably. Probably because the optics can't decide if they're equal or opposite.

Equally amazing !

And you hear people say, "Oh no, those colours clash, i don't know why !"

Another lesson right there. Maybe they just don't genuinely (and sincerely) complement one another enough to sustain a harmonious relationship.~

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

Makes Rainbows / a.k.a Martin



Art:
   martin rainbowmaker's palettes