The profanity of paint

Chapter 9: 8. Colour

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About This Book

A collection of short, reflective essays by a painter that privilege romantic vision and intuition over technical realism, treating colour as a mutable, almost spiritual force beyond pigments. Through meditations on trees and the limits of representation, the author argues that literal training and excessive knowledge can stifle true artistic feeling, and he champions silence, poetic language, and personal temperament as essential to creation. Individual chapters address rhythm, relation, critics, the middle class, extravagance, tragedy, genius, and the idea of a masterpiece, concluding with moral reflections on the artist’s mission and the tension between perception and portrayal.

8. Colour

VERY few understand how much colour means to the colourist, or why, in the higher sense, like music it has no plural. Colours are the pigments, the materials: but colour is the soul of things!

I believe colour belongs to the fairies; it never comes quite within our grasp. It is borne upon the air, its chariot is the morning dews, and its paths the sunbeams. I have come to regard colour as a spiritual thing changing for ever, as all spiritual things do. Of a truth it is the beautiful emblem of change. The idea of eternal change is fascinating beyond measure. God never created a fixture intentionally. We are immortal only inasmuch as we are eternally moving with the thought of God!