Blinks

 Blinks 

When I was at art school perched on a high stool with a pigtail down my back, I was painting a shell, its mother-of-pearl captivating me - the principal of the art school, Byam Shaw, came up behind me and said, 'Oh Roberts', that was my maiden name, 'what colours you are seeing today.' The voice was disapproving. I was seeing colours in the iridescence that he did not see - and I have been seing them ever since, or attempting to, beause colours hide, they will only show themselves under the right conditions, and only to certain eyes at certain times.

As Bridget Riley has said: 'I take something - a colour, say yellow - merely a name, an inert motion - but if you put yellow with other colours in different proportions and positions, it starts to show a certain potential. It may appear lighter or darker, expand, flow into other colours, changing them. It could glow or reced and do on, and none of this behaviour you would know until you try. So right at the beginning I think - well, just see what yellow can do.' Such words are near to my inner eyes. I wrote about 'unknown colour' in an article in Circle, a book written in 1937 by the constructive artists Naum Gabo, Ben Nicholson, Leslie Martin and others of that time of vision and clarity.

As a child, and ever since, I have painted rainbows - the mathematics of colour, their sequence as true in painting as in music or the multiplcation table - their appearing and diappearing as unreal as myth or fairy tale. Who can find the pot of gold at the rainbow's foot, where it touches the earth? Who can see the colour at either end of the rainbow beyond ultraviolet, before infra-red? Some people can, some people can't. Goethe called it 'peach colour'. What a name for anything so magic - except that peaches are not the colour that we are speaking of, and so it is as good a word as any of those others that we use for colours - those sensations that are indescribable in words. We speak of them as canaries, as lemons, as sunflowers, if we are trying to evoke yellow. But where does it go when the crimson flashlight blinds it, or the red car I drive comes into the electric illumination of Carlisle and my car becomes neutral dun?

Flowers and jewels are the only things that express colour fairly constantly. That is why I like them, especially flowers, for flowers know how to accord their flower colour to the colour of their foliage. How do they know? I suppose the same knowledge that tells them that bees like scent - and scent means honey. How do they know those things without brain cells? They are as mysterious to us as the rainbow itself. How do they know when we like them so as to respond to our liking? Even the rainbow cannot do that. I can attract a tendril towards me, but I have never been able to call down a rainbow to my hand. Or is that what a halo is? 'Whiter than any fuller can white them.'

Be that as it may, what I have tried to do is paint pictures that can call down colour, so that a picture can be a lamp in one's home, not merely a window. A window is what landscape painters build into the density of the walls of those rectangles with which we surround ourselves and call our homes. The density of our vision of light is what I would like to pierce. Have I done it at all in any small way?

The first of my pictures was painted when I was a girl before the First World War, and last - well, yesterday; and I will try to do a better one tomorrow. There are so many colours that have not yet been seen. The tyranny of forms and recognized forms - can we not let our eyes free to see, to behold, what has not yet been seen of the spiral river of light?

Perhaps only with a blink or two at a time, out of the dimness into focus. These are the blinks I needed - everyone will have their own. It takes several blinks in the dark to see colour.

The first blink was when Byam Shaw told me that the colour the Pre-Raphaelites used had not held purple and cruel green because they had not seen colour as chiaroscuro - the photographer has taught us that light and shade define the space where things stnd - so does colour.

Then I went to India, and noticed how eastern art uses lilac to create sunlight. After I married my eyes were opened by the Post-Impressionists. The third blink was the remark Gauguin made to Van Gogh when his friend wrote to him to ask how to make blue as blue as the Mediterranean sky. Gaugin wrote back: 'A large space of blue is bluer than a small space.'

The fourth blink was from Van Gogh, when I realized how he used the complimentary colours in contrast - red against green, blue against yellow; the duality of cold and hot which leads to madness, as Van Gogh himself found out.

And the fifth blink was when Mondrian said to me: 'Red, Yellow, Blue - these three are pure. Purple, Ornage, Green are impure, not abstract colours.'

And sixth, I said to myself: 'Why? Why halt the river of light at three stations and not at seven? The sevenfold rhythm of the scale of music, and maybe of the universe - so work with seven colours in mind, either visible or invisible, evoked by their absence, and so discover the colours of delight.'

I would like to thank all those people who have helped to open my eyes, all the people who have brought those pictures and taught me by buying them, and to thank all those members of my family who have helped, each in their own way - my grandfather George Howard, friend of the Pre-Raphaelites, of WIlliam Morris and Burne-Jones, with whom we walked hand in hand in the glens of fancy - Ben Nicholson with his eyes of genius, that see reality - our daughter Kate who understands how colours make movement - a grandson who will one day make blackness into a colour. Who else? Many others. But most of all to the wild flowers of Cumberland, of Lugano, of Mycenae, who have blossomed before my eyes and inspired me, whether they knew it or whether they did not.

 

(Published in Winifred Nicholson; Paintings 1900-1978, Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, 1979, and again in Unknown Colour; Paintings, Letters, Writings, by Winifred Nicholson,  ed. Andrew Nicholson, Faber and Faber, London 1987).