Recently, an artist friend of mine chose to give me some sage advice – “if you want to sell your paintings then you need more colour”. My reply was that the paintings weren’t about colour but about ideas. He couldn’t see the distinction and nothing I could say was going to change his mind. Painting = colour. At that point, for a number of reasons, I was using a monochrome palette and relishing the possibilities. However, that statement set me thinking. Has my palette ever been any different even when I was using colour extensively? Could I even call myself a colourist? It was more than obvious that I thought in terms of tones, not hues anyway. It’s not that I don’t know colour theory or couldn’t put together  pleasing analogous combinations but more that I divide the palette tonally.

On looking back over the decades of stage productions that I had created, it soon became evident that my favoured combination was red, black and white. And I wasn’t alone. Turns out that 19^th century anthropologists in search of answers that divided the nature vs nurture debate in relation to how we see colour, discovered that such a combination was everywhere in the non-western or ‘uncivilised’ world. Far from the poetic license attributed to peculiarities in colour perception found in ancient texts, the words used to describe colours were often limited to just red, black and white. Black was used for all dark colours- as long as they did not contain hints of red. Similarly, white was used for all non- dark colours. Red, stood alone. Blue and green were regarded as hues of the same colour. It wasn’t that the colours didn’t exist, or that people couldn’t see them, but that the words to describe them were limited to tonal distinctions.

More peculiar still is the way we use colour language today. ‘White’ wine is in reality a yellowish green; black cherries are dark red; red squirrels are clearly a shade of brown and ‘orange’ juice is yellow. Red hair isn’t red by any measure of redness but a shade of brown. Even amongst human beings and differentiated skin colour, black is brown and white is pinkish grey…and ‘yellow’, who knows? In this a matter or convention, culture, perception or the inadequacy of words to describe colour at all?

In the poetry of Homer, as in the Illiad and the Odyssey, honey and gold were described as green, horses and cattle as red, sheep as violet and the ocean as the colour of wine. It was considered in the mid 19^th century that Homer was probably colour blind, as was the whole Greek nation for not picking up on it. Further study found that colour blind language wasn’t confined to just classical Greeks but classical Indians and all of those occupying the Tigris Euphrates basin. Blue as a colour seems not to have existed at all in either written or perceptual form. Guy Deutscher in Through The Language Glass [Picador 2010] comes down in favour of culture. The ancients simply didn’t need the colour words we accept as normal.

Now I will be the first to admit to liking black, white and red as a colour combination and being mostly unable to distinguish numbers and letters in those annoying games where a number or letter is immersed in a red/green background. I can tell traffic lights apart purchase the correct paint colour and mix any colour that I want, so what does it matter if those games give me trouble? What is telling though, are the number of people who are markedly colour blind. Research indicates that colour blindness (colour vision deficiency, or CVD) affects approximately 1 in 12 men (8%) and 1 in 200 women in the world. The inability to see parts of the spectrum or differentiate between them is widespread and we seem to have inherited these traits somewhere along the evolutionary trail. As a species we still can’t see ultraviolet as it burns its way through layers of skin – but can only hope.

Then there are all of those art buyers selecting art work to hang on the wall based upon their perception of colour. While they can apply the correct terminology for prismatic colour, having grown up with it, what they think are appealing colour combinations may be based upon flawed data. Where does that leave the artist? I can well recall someone talking about my ‘yellow painting’ in disparaging terms leaving me in a state of disquiet not just for the criticism but for the fact that I had never painted a yellow painting. What the critic was referring to remains a mystery. There are of course all of those paint colours referred to as blue [primary, ultramarine, cerulean, cobalt, pthalo and capitol] and their equivalents in red and yellow. It’s enough to confuse anyone.

I can also remember talking to a landscape painter who traditionally worked en plein air. She had mixed up a considerable quantity of what she was calling sky blue and had then realised that she didn’t need it all. With a self-satisfied sigh she consigned the extra to a jar with the words that it would do for the next painting. Apparently, the sky was always the same hue or shade of blue. I said nothing.

What then does all of this amount to? When Gladstone wrote his impressive three volume tome on Homeric poetry and identified the lack of colour language, he thought he was onto something. Humankind was colour blind three of four millennia ago and colour sense had evolved in the interim. Later researchers doubted that such evolution was possible in so short a time and only the introduction of colours such as blue from lapis lazuli, yellow from saffron and purple for dying togas prompted language to describe them. Differentiating humankind into black, white and yellow according to approximations of words to describe skin colour may well have evolved with travel. American Indians describing the western invaders as ‘white’ and the invaders describing the native population as ‘red,’ to say nothing of ‘black’ Africans, may well have been the result of tourism. The unfamiliar needs words to describe it. Mind you, if you read any tourist brochure on the Mediterranean, the sea and sky are always Azure no matter what colour they actually are at any given time of day.

Now I am in a quandary. Does my painting lack colour or just the wrong colours? Is my red/green colour differentiation to blame? How do I know what the audience is actually seeing in terms of the colour I use? Do they even give the same names to the colours as I do? Are they seeing colour at all? With all of the of colour receptors in the centre of the eye and the tonal ones on the outer edge, seeing colour at night is problematic with a dilated lens anyway. Digital cameras do a better job in that each pixel contains both colour and black and white data. Let’s hope no one is judging my colour use in the dark – or maybe that is the way it should be seen.