by Christopher van Donkelaar
Colour is more than hue. Hue is an aspect of light (and its spectrum) but colour cannot be properly circumscribed only within light. Especially in our digital age, where light emitting diodes can be our most common source of colour, it is easy to equate it as wholly a property of light, but light and hue are only one aspect of colour. To more fully comprehend it, we must look to the tangible materials used to create colour. These can come straight from the ground, and such earth colours in relation to the places they were found are especially potent in considering what colour can be to the artist and a community. To really understand colour, ‘from the ground up’, I have begun to look at the substance and the mystery of the local colours beneath my feet.
Beyond the ethereal hue bestowed by light, such earth colours are permeated with place and spirit: My own experience in using the coloured earths I have collected from a haunted cave or from the soil of a small village have taught me a great deal on a variety of topics. This fuller understanding is one that I am beginning to define as local-colour, which I hope can also be useful, and meaningful, to other artists.
I hope that this burgeoning account of my thoughts and discoveries is helpful to others also interested in learning from the dirt.
The Paradox of Meaningful Colour
The assumptions of the modern mind have been formed with the conviction that the physical measurements of the material world are real, and that the ideas about them are only partial explanations. But another, traditional worldview would approach reality in quite the reverse way: Ideas are real, and our observations of physical things only form partial, or transient, accounts. In the first view, a woman is a tinker, using the bits and pieces of collected information to form her theories; in the latter, she must be something of a mystic to make sense of divine patterns. In the first, a man reaches for callipers; in the second, he invokes muses and looks for angels.
In modern thinking, earth pigments are created because a certain type of mineralogically rich rock is crushed into powder; as such, the existence of it is thought of solely in terms of the tangible. This scientific view has become ubiquitous, but is really only one way to comprehend the world (much like linear perspective in drawing today has become the norm). Scientists are not the only ones straining to comprehend the world: Poets, philosophers and theologians also have a perspective to offer.
What if we tried to see the world from a metaphysical philosophy such as the hylomorphic view, first proposed by Aristotle (†322 BC), that sees ideas (or forms) as indwelling matter? In such an example, a pigment colour couldn’t exist without both the matter from which it takes substance and the idea to form it; so only through both would the earth pigment be in-formed. The physical (matter) and intentional (ideas), in a sense, would then cooperate to form our world.
The same notion has been applied within theology to explain the relationship of God and his world. In his Confessions, St. Augustine (†AD 430) wrote,
Ideas are forms or stable and unchangeable essences of things. They are themselves not formed, and they are eternal and always in the same state because they are contained in God’s intelligence. They neither come into being nor do they pass away, but everything that can or does come into being and passes away is formed in accordance with them
Going further, what if matter were described as having a hunger for form? Within the writings of the Islamic poet Avicebron (†1070), he likens form and matter to lover and beloved; the two yearn for one another. Such poetic notions have the potential to influence our own perception of mankind’s actions within the environment.
The consequences of this worldview would charge mankind to feed this hunger and satisfy this yearning; humanity’s vocation would become one of husbandry in relating to the yearnings of seen and unseen things. Thus everyone, within their diverse vocations, would in-form the world (and the artist would create her pigments, and her art, in response to the seen and unseen world).
These are significant poetic, philosophical, and theological notions, but are they still relevant today? It seems to me that the more we measure the world, the more we are realizing the limits of our measurements. Take, for example, the 2004 ARS Electronica symposium, where Roger F. Maline, previous Director of the NASA EUVE Observatory at the University of California, Berkeley, and of the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille, in responding to a question regarding a timeline to totally measure the universe around us, stated that,
“If someone had asked me, when I began my career in the 1950’s, how long it would be until we had measured everything, I would have guessed maybe five to ten years. Today, even if we extended all of our senses through instruments to the absolute degree, we estimate that it would only be possible to measure roughly 3% of what’s actually there.”
As the modern mind encounters the realities of our limited ability to measure the world, it will be interesting to see if we begin to reconsider the place of understanding the world through measurement alone. Our well-intentioned, but arrogant reasoning, would do well to bend closer to the dirt from which life has emerged. Otherwise, in isolating aspects of the woad plant—to consider indigo based-pigments, for instance—we ignore too much significance within both the plant and its colour; reducing it to a tunnel-visioned concept drawn solely from our purposeful measurements. Ideas imbue even humble things like pigments with deeper meanings, and help us to become aware of the world’s fullness. I feel a more holistic approach would be greatly beneficial today: Wonder, which thus would be our state in considering measured matter joined with meaningful ideas, becomes our response toward the whole cosmos— down to the very microcosm of the pigments themselves.
Some pigments emerge from an unremembered history of associations, drawing a long line between their prehistoric origins and their continued use today: Red ochre is one of these colours. Associations, such as bright red and blood, go back to a time when both reds had an iron tang and a metallic smell, whether the source was a mammal or the earth. Pigments, within a broader worldview (and as a physical material, rather than a hue within the spectrum), become capable of including these additional meanings, and are deepened by the myths that imbue them.
There is a beautiful story of how the Provencal hills became full of red ochre; I tell it to my children something like this,
‘Long, long ago, in the time when many of the things we now experience as spirit were framed, the archangel Gabriel was travelling in the hills east of the Rhône River, when he was ambushed by a group of his fallen brethren. Since Gabriel was unyielding, it followed that this meeting could only be resolved by violence. Time and place, as it was wont to do so long ago, contracted and expanded — and so their fight was over in a moment and in an eon. But, once it was finished, all the demons were slaughtered, and their blood stained down to the hill’s roots. This post-angelic blood didn’t fade, remaining bright over time, so artists used these ochres, forming unchanging colours from the once immortal.’
Likewise, local stories around the Porte de l’Enfer, in Ontario, Canada can be equally rich,
‘There is a stretch along the Mattawa River that is only green-greys, and black. The stoney-earth is grey, the deep-river, black, and the few stubborn evergreens there provide a little green. The earth plunges like straight walls out of the water’s blackness; this, combined with a strong current, makes rest (or escape) impossible. It is only accessible by canoe, and there is a suffocating sense when gliding along this black water, as if one was traversing an inverted night sky. Along these walls, there is an orifice from which pours an unearthly red; bright and fiery. The stories tell how inside the cave a demon guards this gateway to hell. I have been in this cave; it is a haunted place, where no one living dwells for long …’
As an artist I am interested in these narratives and ask with intention: How do I keep the demon in my paint-pot? I want my earth pigments to weave their myth through a dappled array of meanings, affirming their stories of origin in nature and in other worlds — and thus creating and enchanting the world today.
Christian iconography, traditionally, understood these aims of taking the plants and soils of their localities and bringing them together into a sacred space. During my apprenticeship with the monks of St. Theodore’s House, I was taught that, from the eastern Christendom perspective, this wasn’t a transition from the profane to the sacred, but from the singular to the whole (much like an instrument joining an orchestra): The voice of each pigment colour was carefully placed within the architecture of the church, and transformed into surface and symbol, so that all together they might reveal the essence of that place’s community: Individually and corporately; temporal and eternal.
A specific pigment enriched by such myth and metaphor is ivory black. The original creation of this black pigment from the tusks of elephants is attributed to the Greek artist, Apelles. And, according to his biographers, his black creation was one of the four colours he used exclusively within his paintings. Apelles’ ivory black is a perfect example of imbibing a colour with shifting meanings over many millennia. The resulting Elephantium pigment has its origins with the Greeks, but it doesn’t end there.
While it has always been possible for the artist to create bone black from the leftovers of their table (the result of which did not fetch a price until our modern age), ivory black was priced even more expensively than the brilliant red of vermillion during the middle ages. There is some difference in the amount of carbon in ivory black that does render it a more precise and opaque pigment in painting, but this difference in its chemical makeup was not enough to justify its high price. Instead, it was the connection between the pigment and the cultural understanding of that time around the elephant that offers the explanation. The elephant itself was an animal of myth and allegory during this time. One has only to turn to the bestiaries of the day to listen to the wonder with which this animal was contemplated. The elephant was the antithesis of the dragon, being likened to Christ himself in many texts. This juxtaposition was carried beyond the allegorical, and text from the period go on to claim that where elephant bones were burned, “… no evil thing will come, nor dragon.” Apparently, the elephant’s goodness went right to its bones; holy texts or images written in ivory black were considered apotropaic!
Today, artists might also be interested in considering new interpretations for this pigment. What does ivory black say today, in a culture where trade in ivory is banned? I don’t think it is as straightforward as one might suppose: Ivory as a substance is equated in our imagination with the rotting carcasses of elephants, and therefore the worldwide ban is a source of common pride. But the reality of ivory today is also the warehouses full to bursting of ivory tusks collected from the elephants of the national park systems in Africa. These tusks are the remains of elephants that died naturally within the park, but still their trade is prohibited both by law and public opinion. The parks are extremely poor and the income from these tusks would mean a great deal to their systems, and to the care of the elephants, and to the people residing there. Ivory black remains something very potent. I have made ivory black from elephant tusks and I continue to use it in my painting — in doing so, both the mediaeval and the modern ideas play within my mind. To me, ivory black is inescapably potent.
And, even if in our accepted modern practice we choose to use only the common cousin of ivory black, bone black, should there not be some consideration in handling the remains of a dead animal within the artist’s work and studio? If bones can be somehow ‘sacred’, is not the earth, by the same arguments imbued with the basic elements of existence and to be at least acknowledged and respected? My digging deeper into colour in this way, is one of the reasons I have attempted to map the colours with which I work: It is to acknowledge the mysterious and the object as one.
Placing Colour on the Map
Four colours only—white from Milos, Attic yellow, red from Sinope on the Black Sea, and the black called Atramentum—were used by Apelles, Aetion, Melanthios and Nichomachus in their immortal works; illustrious artists, a single one of whose pictures the wealth of a city would hardly suffice to buy, while now that even purple clothes our walls, and India contributes the ooze of her rivers and the blood of dragons and of elephants, no famous picture is painted.
This is what Pliny the Elder (†AD 79) reported in his famous book Naturalis Historia. In his account he uses a very specific way of referencing colour for his audience. Although his point was to lament the bright, gaudy colours used by the painters of his day (and contrast them against the restrained pallets of great artists of the past) the system he assumes should be of greater interest to artists today. Pliny doesn’t record his four colours as, “white, yellow, red, and black”, but instead as, “white from Melos, Attic yellow, red from Sinope on the Black Sea, and the black called Atramentum”. In each case, he identifies the colour not by an arbitrary hue, but through connecting them to their place (or their process).
Mellian white (or, melinum — literally, “white from Milos”) comes from a very specific place: Milos, a volcanic Greek island in the Aegean Sea, just north of the Sea of Crete. Today, due to this soil’s complex composition, scientific classification of this earth is still uncertain, but for artists, whose interests are more about a colour’s hue, opacity, workability, etc., this classification by place remains accurate. Attic yellow, similarly, is an earth pigment that originates from Attica, in Greece. Sinoper (literally, “red from Sinope”) is pigment that comes from one of the rivers outside of Sinope, most notably the Kizilirmak River, and again represents a colour and its place of origin as connected through its naming. This red pigment was especially prized throughout the ancient world and into modern times, so much so that an account from the twelfth century states, “Sinopis … is a … colour redder than vermilion, so that when the vermilion itself is very precious on account of its beauty, the heralds praising it call it sinopis, although the vermilion resembles it on account of its redness.”. Atramentum was used generally to refer to any carbon based black, however Pliny makes it clear later in his treatise that he is referring specifically to the pigment Elephantinum, created by Apelles. In all three of his initial examples, Pliny conveys the specific colour he means by placing it on a map.
Such earth colours, despite the modern groupings of hue or chemical composition becoming dominant, are still often categorized as they relate to a place. Sienna and Umbria are still Italian cities whose names are now synonymous with the unique colours that their hills produce. While Bohemian green earth, Verona green earth, and Cyprus green earth, still prefix their place origins before their identifying name. As such, both green earth and sienna pigments provide examples of how artists, of the present and past, understood their pigment colours through their places of origin. And, by exploring my own local region, the potential of local-colour for myself as an artist has begun to be realized.
Green earth pigments appear a little pale, and slightly greyish green, to many artists today. Their use historically, however, was extremely widespread, extending from the first century AD frescos at Ajanta, India to the Tsimshian stone masks from the Pacific coast of Canada. Artists as varied as Michelangelo, Saloman van Ruysdael, Vermeer, and Turner all made use of this unique earth. And, while the hues created by modern chemistry have redefined our notion of what green’s intensity and hue is, green earth—due to its permanency, stability, and unreactive nature which makes it suitable for use in all media—still has a lot to offer. This is especially true when considering the safety of the artist and the fact that modern manufactured pure pigment greens are at their most benign in the form of verdigris (a copper acetate, which is poisonous) and peak at emerald green (made by joining copper acetate with arsenic trioxide, which is toxic).
The most famous, large-scale sources of green earth were collected outside the city of Verona, from the region of Bohemia, and from the island of Cyprus. Each of these was famous for its distinctive hue (usually judged on a scale between yellowish and blueish) and artists still request a specific place’s green earth today. Although these deposits are the best known, many other examples existed of smaller productions, or places where artist’s would collect their own: Cennini (†AD 1440) describes how his father Andrea took him to the green earth deposits in Colle di Val d’Elsa above the town of Dometaria and Vitruvius (†15 BC) describes a green earth pigment he called Creta Viridis and states that the best variety of this came from the estates of Thedoteos in Smyrna (in modern day Turkey) and was thus called Theodoteion.
Even today, an artist on the look-out can find places where green spills from the earth. My favourite comes from a little out-jut of northernly rocks along Highway 7, in Ontario, Canada, where a single band of green earth exists between sandy Palaeozoic limestone and black Precambrian andesite. In between these two rock formations is a green gash of very beautiful colour with the interesting property (unique in my experience) of oscillating between being warm or cool when heated. I suppose, given that it is found just outside of the small town of Madoc, that it is an example of ‘Madoc’ green earth!
By naming a pigment Madoc green earth, the place’s name is used as a prefix to the known pigment type. This was most often the case across the vast variety of earth pigments used historically. In doing so, artists demonstrated that they valued the unique qualities of these particular place pigments. It wasn’t specific enough to describe a pigment as, ‘green earth’; with the addition of the pigment’s originating place the colour’s hue, warmth or coolness, transparency, and a host of other working properties, became communicated, enabling artists to choose the variety most specific to their particular needs.
Perhaps no stronger example of placed colour exists than when the name of a colour becomes synonymous with the place from which it originates—this is the case with the colour sienna. The people of Siena, a Tuscan hill town dating back archeologically to 900 BC, record the town’s origins to its founder, Senius. Senius was the son of Remus the brother of Romulus, after whom Rome itself was named. Originally the pigment from this area was sold under its literal Italian name, Terra di Siena, but in the 19th century the pigment’s name became anglicized and was dubbed simply, ‘sienna’. It was also as this pigment became entrenched in the English language and in the artist’s minds, that a distinction was made between the pigment in its raw and burnt form. When roasted, sienna’s colour changes from an orangish-yellow to a reddish-brown. This change is common to all iron ochres and offers a variety of colour hues unrivalled as a mineral pigment.
Ochres are essentially weathered yellow or red rocks—usually iron based—the hydrous iron oxide imparting its yellow colour and the anhydrous oxide its red colour. The amount of the iron oxide in an ochre sample is quite variable, and can be as low as about 20%, and as high as 70%. Ochre becomes dubbed, ‘sienna’ when it has a small amount of manganese oxide (less than 10%) in addition to the common iron oxide. Once the amount of manganese oxide exceeds 10%, that pigment is termed an umbre. In the case of sienna, the pigments etymology refers to the place where it was mined. Sienna continued to be mined at its namesake until the 1940s, on the western slopes of Monte Amiata in Tuscany, but since then, has been mined from other locations around the world which offer an earth pigment of similar properties.
Ideally, for a place and a colour to share a name (and thus be joined) opens up a world of possibilities and associations. The colour itself is classified in a manner that specifically supports the artist’s aesthetics. Burnt sienna means more than just, “reddish brown” to the painter, it refers to the colour’s warmth, transparency, and to a host of other properties that are tangible to the artist. The artist chooses for the look and for the feel of the pigment to be used. I feel that there is real power in such colours when they become ‘local-colours’, in ways that impregnate the community.
I once worked with an old-order Mennonite mason to repair a fieldstone foundation. As he passed a smooth stone from one hand to the other he told me that he was listening to the rock, letting it tell him where it wanted to go. I learned a pivotal lesson that day: An artist needs to listen and learn from his materials. I’ve experienced since then that some materials have more personality than others, and that earth colours are especially strongly imbued with such character. This personality within earth colours, which is so essential within artist’s work, can turn dirt into a trusted friend and a mentor with which to converse on the canvas.
This same personality is present in the material’s stubbornness; which quickly results in the artist’s intention being unrealized through their ignorance. These, ‘mistakes’ have time and again proven to be my greatest learning opportunities—and humbling experiences which have been beneficial for my artist’s ego. These mistakes challenge the artist to rethink and recreate their ideas within a greater reality than they were previously aware of, and imbue the process with a frustrated passion. Ironically, the result of this grounded instruction from the dirt is an expansive reality full of new creative possibilities.
When interpreting such materials within a very specific place, colour can become akin to place through the creative interpretations of a community’s various vocations. Thus, local-colour can be defined as the colour resulting from people forming community through creative interactions within their immediate environment. It is because a group of people chose to focus on a single place that the results are joined through their material-basis, but diverse in their various ideas.
In such an environment everyone is called upon to listen and create. The artist may paint her canvas with the resulting pigments, but that same material will also find use in the hands of the community’s gardeners, brickmakers and carpenters. And, beyond these tangible examples, even the colour of local stories will change: The story of a young girl who runs away from her evil step mother and lives with seven dwarves, is most widely known as the story of Snow White; but in the rural villages of southern Italy this same story’s heroine is named Ragazza di Latte (Milk White). Here, the storyteller’s description form new adjacent possibilities for the whole and so the idea of white moves from something frozen to something warm. Together the experience and imagination form the idea of the local community—and this formation is underpinned by the lessons of the common environmental materials of which they make use.
The voice of local colour reverberates throughout such a community. Its raw colour remains along the river’s bank, but it also is transformed into the food and shelter of the community. Even the way the community is formed is informed by this material. The paint and colour of a house’s door will depend on its needs and community’s creativity, but mostly on local material, as will whether that door is made from wood, textile or stone. And although I am aware that this may sound idealistic and limiting in the so-called, ‘global’ community, I believe the specifics of place, the identification of those places through colour, and the identification of colour through those places would enrich life and counteract the tendency toward what I see as a deadening trend toward homogeny.
For the artist, even the most rudimentary earth sources offer a wide variety of colourful possibilities. The colours from a single place do not limit the palette of the artist as much as one might initially think; especially when one defines colour as more than just hue. These subtle possibilities are endless and various colours from within a region offer a special form of spectral compatibility due to their common elements and impurities. Still, where the modern artist might not see the variety of hues they are used to having at their disposal, I have found it worthwhile to ponder such limitations from the perspective offered by Georges Braque (†AD 1963), “Limitation of means determines style, engenders new form, and gives impulse to creation”.
Anticipating a rich variety of colour available from a single place might seem counter-intuitive; after all with so many pigment and paint-colours available, how could colours from a single place offer the artist the riches available on the art-store’s rack. But, whenever I walk around a store selling tubed paints, I am always surprised when a specific brand of manufactured paint only offers one instance of, ‘yellow ochre’. My own collection of earth pigments has thirty odd examples of just this traditional pigment designation. From a warm French ochre, to a cool Polish ochre, to a pale example from Cyprus, to an almost florescent example from an abandoned mine in the northern Canadian shield; what constitutes, ‘yellow ochre’ is shockingly unrepresented on the store’s shelf. It is worth considering that, in the end, place might actually offer more colour complexity for the artist. This doesn’t always mean that all possible colours are available to immediately scoop from the ground and apply to the canvas, but instead begins with an exploration of a handful of earth.
It is this potential of local-colour to reveal its limitless nuances of meaning and mystery, and at the same time to ‘ground’ an artist in his art through a sense of place, that fascinates and informs my art praxis. In the Berlin exhibition of 2011, I only lay out a few samples, as notes from a geological dig, where I have mapped out a variety of colours in regions that I have begun to explore. Today, when many cities are trying to create a sense of place that can seem contrived due to their attempt to create a, ‘community brand’, one thing I like about the idea of local-colour, and the work that has resulted from it, is that it makes the environment that surrounds us, but is oftentimes unseen in daily life, foundational to that community. I hope that more artists will become tuned into that, and remind people that the creative manipulation of our environment (whether to paint, build, grow, etc.) is one of the most significant aspects of being human, and a great centre for the formation of a community.
Canadian Colours (and my Conclusion)
The specific place colours present in Canada remain largely unexplored. It seems that the taste for refined European pigments early in the nation’s history, and the sudden shift to chemically produced pigment colour that followed, made such exploration of local colour undesired on a large scale. But, examples of local colour, with roots back a few centuries, still do exist in many villages, along with the odd example of a more purposeful search for these colours. Exploring these, and ‘unearthing’ their potential, is of great interest to me as a Canadian artist.
My own village of Conestoga was created between two rivers in Ontario, Canada. Originally the structures were built from the forest (and even this wood has a particular tint) but as the people began to know this new place, and play with the environmental possibilities, the clay from the Conestoga River’s bank began to be interpreted. Potters like William Eby (†AD 1907) created plates, bowls, and other utilitarian pieces from this clay. Similarly, brickmakers began building huge beehive-shaped kilns to fire that same clay, and people began to wrap their homes with this solidified local sediment. Their doors and window sills were painted with pigment from the village’s pigment mill, where nuggets of bog iron were fired to create a beautiful, ‘burnt sienna’. Goodworth and Sill’s ‘Chocolate Brown’—as it was locally know—was produced until the mill blew up around the turn of the last century, but this same pigment was used locally until the village’s painter, Henry Hackborn, retired. This industrious translation of the local environment into a community is an amazing achievement of exploring the possibilities and potential of a local environment.
Conestoga is only one example of a typical history around the founding of a village in southern Ontario in the 1800s; such examples provide a new basis for defining community. Instead of being founded on a common ideology or employment, Conestoga was created by people interpreting an environment into a community. The rivers, trees, and mud all found purpose (to place them within a broader worldview) through these actions. And, if translation from one language to another is an opportunity to understand new meaning in a written account, so is building a community from a local environment an opportunity to disclose new meaning from that place.
As an artist, I find the resulting colours from these community dialogues between people and place to be fascinating. There is no mistaking the colour that emerges from firing the river-bank clay from the Conestoga River with other colours from other rivers. Very specific colour identification is possible when a colour is linked to a place; like an expert rock-hounder, it takes only a glance for an artist to know where such a colour originates. Its hue, and the colours resulting from heating it; the smell released and the sound when grinding it; even its flow when made into paint; all these identify it as being from Conestoga. The resulting pigment’s hue is by no means static either: If people work with it for a time, as is done within a community setting, its potential begins to look limitless.
A whole new world has opened up to me in beginning to think about colour as place; a place where intention and the spiritual imbue even the rocks with myths and wonder—where art becomes important in the earth’s husbandry through listening and action. This new understanding of colour is a place from which I intend to explore further, and dig deeper.