Trauma & Art

A box of colours                                                              Edited 18/ 05/ 2025

Extract from my more personal writing:

“‘The colour blue – that is my colour – and the colour blue means you have left the drabness of day-to-day reality to be transported into – not a world of fantasy, it’s not a world of fantasy – but a world of freedom where you can say what you like and what you don’t like. This has been expressed forever by the colour blue, which is really sky blue’ Louise Bourgeois

The season had come for me to lift the curtains and look at the light and the darkness and the colours and shapes of things from a place of new knowing of what I had implicitly always known. The white light, which at the time seemed as ‘the end of a tunnel’, when my breathing cracked, was not of a blinding pure fluorescent white, it was a milky, softer white. It is believed that white light contains all colours, whereas the white of pigment could be described as the absence of colour.  You can’t mix colours, you need to start with a white pigment. Thoughts about colour and art occupy my mind every now and then, and sometimes even during moments of duress.  Once as I was sinking from anaesthesia before a removal of fibroids surgery, favourite paintings emerged in my dazed awareness. I woke up accompanied by a particular painting with vibrant oranges and reds by Tetsis.

As a child I liked looking at pictures and the shapes light created on the surface of objects. I was fascinated by the dance between the shades of green and the sunlight on the porcelain tiles of the fireplace in the living room, and I wondered if there was a way to paint the light on surfaces. I found that grey produced from white and black seemed clean, strict and authoritarian, even though I did not know the word authoritarian then, but when it came about from mixing leftover paints one ended up with ‘dirty greys’, or the colour of quick sand and mud. The same happened to plasticine once I had mixed enough colours enough times.

Francis Ponge writes: ‘Our soul resents it. Our feet and wheels trample it. “Mud” is how we address those we hate, paying little attention to the injustice done to the mud. Does it really deserve the constant humiliation, attacked with such an atrocious persistence? Mud, so despised, I love you….’                        (Mud: The Unfinished Ode by Francis Ponge)”.                                   Tonya Alexandri-2017
 The Secret Lives of Colour, written by Kassia St. Clair, is a historical exploration of the world of colours. St. Clair illustrates how important colours have been in human history and what individual colors have meant throughout the centuries. She discusses how colours exist as much in the socio-cultural and political realm, as they do physically, and therefore, should also be understood as subjective cultural creations.

St. Clair initially introduces the basic science of colour and how we see colour. Around 4.5% of the world’s population are colour-blind or deficient because of faults in their cone cells.The phenomenon is usually genetic and is more prevalent in men: around 1 in 12 men are affected compared to 1 in 200 women. For people with ‘normal’ colour vision, when cone cells are activated by light, they relay the information through the nerve system to the brain, which in turn interprets this as colour; however, the interpretation stage is not that straightforward.

In a chapter with the title, Chromophilia, chromophobia: Politics of colour, she explains how a certain distaste for colour runs through Western culture, and that many classical writers were dismissive, believing that colour was a distraction from design / line and form. In art, she says, the tussle over the respective merits of drawing versus colour raged on through the Renaissance, and even today, though somewhat muted. Colour has even been viewed as sinful. The Protestants, for instance, writes St. Clair, expressed their intellectual simplicity, severity and humility in a palette dominated by black and white; bright colours like red, orange, yellow and blue were removed from the walls of their churches, houses and wardrobes, and pious Henry Ford refused for many years to produce cars in any colour other than black.

Also, during different historical periods there were laws that governed what class of people could wear certain colors. Difficult to create colors, like purple, “a greedy consumer of resources,” and red, and brighter colours, were reserved for kings and queens, cardinals, and the ruling class in general, while dull, earthy colours like grey and brown were confined to the poor, rural peasants and the working class. Tyrian purple dipped cloth, for instance, was worth its weight in gold, and by the 4^th century AD in Rome only the emperor was allowed to wear Tyrian purple; anyone else caught wearing it could face death. St. Clair writes that as colours came to take on meanings and cultural significance within societies, attempts were made to restrict their use, through the sumptuary laws. Such laws were passed in ancient Greece, China and Japan, and they found their fullest expression in Europe from the mid-twelfth century. These laws could touch on anything: diet, dress and furnishings, and they sought to enforce social boundaries by encoding the social strata into a clear visual system. Colour became a signifier in this social language.

The book is full of fascinating facts, stories and insights into the use of pigments, dyes and colours. Just to mention a few, Kohl, the black colour used by the Egyptians as eyeliner to make the whites of the eyes stand out was believed to have magical properties, and the Pharaohs valued it so much they buried themselves with it so as to wear it in the afterlife. Naturally, the quality of Kohl depended on the wealth of the wearer. Indigo comes from the Greek word indikon, which means “from India” because it was thought that the seeds of the plant used to obtain indigo blue came from India, which is not actually true, and in the 1500s, in Rome, the indigo pigment was so expensive (one kilogram cost 15x the average salary per day) that some merchants tried to sell a fake product made out of pigeon poop. Absinthe isn’t actually poisonous, but this was a story told to convince people to drink less, and mauve was accidently discovered in the search for a cure for malaria. In 1979, a colour with the name Baker–Miller Pink, first painted on the walls of a US Naval Correctional Centre, was praised for its calming effect on inmates reducing levels of violence within the centre significantly.This gave it something of a pop like status in the US, and as a result it was used for the seats of buses, houses, sports locker rooms, and so on. Subsequently, however, studies conducted by academia produced contradictory results.

Humans have been on an eternal quest to make pigments for artwork, dating back to prehistoric cave dwellers, who had figured out how to make long lasting pigments for their cave drawings. St. Clair writes that Pliny the Elder, a Roman naturalist writing in the first century AD, claimed that painters in classical Greece used only four colours: black, white, red and yellow; however, she notes the Egyptians had discovered a complex way of manufacturing a bright blue at least as early as 2500 BC., but still early artists were restricted.

As part of this endeavor to produce more colours and find more sources for pigments, a huge number of plants, insects, crustaceans and humans have been sacrificed. The food industry, for instance, uses cochineal (officially named E120) in foods. It was only in 2012 that Starbucks was forced to drop E120 after a vehement protest from vegetarians and Muslims. Cochineal is obtained using a pigment from a tiny bug that lives on cacti, which was a sign of power for the Aztecs. Using a version of the forced-labour system the Inca had used to build temples and roads, the Spanish insisted locals over the age of 18 put in a year’s work for subsistence wages. Along with gold and silver, cochineal provided the financial sinew of the Spanish empire. One of the two most profitable mines in the Spanish empire was Cerro Rico, which was viewed by the locals as ‘the mountain that eats men.’  Accidents and mercury poisoning were common.

Metals like iron, copper, silver and gold have a structure that contains mobile electrons that strongly reflect light, and this is what gives these metals their distinctive sheen. St Clair tells us that gold’s glimmer, coupled with its resistance to tarnishing, made it an emblem for divinity; although, it is also associated with greed and avarice, evident in the myth of King Midas. She writes: “The medieval Christian Church binged on the metal.” And for hundreds of years artists liked to use it (e.g. Giotto’s figures are not depicted in a room or landscape but lie on a smooth golden ground; in The Birth of Venus Botticelli wove gold through Venus’s hair; Klimt’s ‘Golden Phase’).

People also became ill or died from dangerous substances like lead and arsenic as colorants in everything from make-up to clothing to wallpaper. Scheele’s Green, and its toxic cousins, St. Calir writes: “were responsible for many deaths, as unsuspecting consumers papered their homes, clothed their offspring and wrapped their baked goods in an exciting new shade that contained lethal doses of arsenic.” Like most colours over the centuries green has been associated with positive and negative qualities, and there have been many irrational taboos and prejudices against colours in different eras. In the West from the 12^th century green started becoming associated with the devil and demonic creatures, maybe St. Clair notes, as a result of the increasing antagonism between Christians and Muslims, for whom the colour was sacred. Brown was also despised, and browns were used and valued mostly after the first period of the Renaissance, in Correggio, Caravaggio and Rembrandt’s great paintings. Anthony van Dyke, in the seventeenth century, became so skilled with one brown pigment that it later became known as ‘Van Dyke brown’.

Lead white was also deadly. In 1678, Sir Philiberto Vernatti described the fate of those involved in the production of white lead. But it wasn’t just the people grinding and producing the pigment that suffered from the effects of lead poisoning. White lead had long been used as a cosmetic to make skin look smooth and pale. St. Clair refers to Xenophon, who wrote disapprovingly of women wearing a ‘plaster of ceruse and minium ((white and red lead)’ in Greece during the 4th century BC. In China and Japan women were mixing a similar poisonous brew with rice powder to use as a foundation, and women in Queen Elizabeth’s court were painting blue veins over a similar very pale base layer. Similarly, two pigments used to produce yellow colours, orpiment and gamboge, were also highly poisonous. Orpiment, a naturally occurring mineral: a canary-yellow sulphide of arsenic (As2S3) is around 60% arsenic and it is deadly, and although it was occasionally taken in minute amounts as a purgative in Java, Bali and China, the risks of abusing it were well known.

Additionally, throughout the book there are references to the multiple associations we make between colours and other things. Let’s take white for instance. St. Clair writes white has an otherness to it, is considered positive or having a religious quality, and it is also connected to power and money. It is the Chinese colour of mourning, and in the West and Japan, brides wear it because it is a colour symbolic of purity. During the English Reformation, churches and parishioners used whitewash to obscure colourful murals and icons that depicted saints in ways they now deemed impious. But she mentions it can also be exclusive, autocratic and neurotic. White has long been connected with money and power, and in the past only the rich could afford to buy and maintain white fabrics because wool and cotton, had to be heavily processed in order to appear white, and then requied a lot of labour to be maintained in an era with no washing machines.

Yellow is another colour group that has been associated with many different positive and negative qualities. In humans, St. CLair writes, the colour betokens illness, sallow skin, jaundice, and when associated to ‘journalism’it indicates rash sensationalism. Yellow has also been associated with sensationalist literature and the “sinful” yellow book covers from the mid-nineteenth century. For others, these sunny covers were symbols of modernity and yellow books show up in two of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings from the 1880s, for whom, among other artists and thinkers of the time, the colour came to stand as the symbol of the age and their rejection of repressed Victorian values. The final decade of the nineteenth century became known as the ‘Yellow Nineties.’

The flow of immigrants from the East [particularly China] to the West, in the early twentieth century, was dubbed the ‘yellow peril’. The most notorious example of yellow as a symbol of stigma is the star the Nazis forced Jews to wear, but other marginalised groups had been forced to wear yellow clothes or signs from the early Middle Ages, and during the Tang dynasty yellow shades and hues were forbidden to common people and officials. In India however, the colour symbolizes spirituality, peace and knowledge, and is associated with Krishna.

As for the orange group St. Clair mentions that the Russian abstract artist, Wassily Kandinsky, described orange as ‘red brought nearer to humanity by yellow,’and wrote that ‘Orange is like a man, convinced of his own powers.” It’s also a colour used to draw attention to potential danger in diverse contexts and cultures, a warning symbols on roads, “in part because it forms a high contrast against the blue-grey asphalt, even in low light.” It is the colour of the Dutch. It was used by the Impressionists and artists like Toulouse-Lautrec, Munch, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Crocuses are one source of saffron orange dye. Traces of natural saffron have been found in paintings in Iraq made 50,000 years ago, and the ancient Greeks used crocuses / κρόκος to dye their clothes. It has also been used to dye Buddhist robes, but its scarcity and high cost has resulted in it being replaced by turmeric, and currently synthetic dyes.

St. Clair’s chapter on language and colour is especially interesting. She points out that the study of old texts by ancient Greeks, especially Homer, the Bible in its original Hebrew, the Quran, Vedic chants from India, and ancient Chinese and Icelandic stories, seem to exhibit “the same muddled references to colour.” She refers to the relativists’s view that supports that language shapes perception and that without a word for a colour we don’t see it as distinct, and to the universalists’s view that suggests that basic colour categories are universal and rooted, somehow, in our biology. She concludes that what is certain is that the language of colour is complex.

There is a plethora of information in the book, as St. Clair discusses 75 different shades, dyes and hues. And I think her book would interest anyone who loves colours or / and is interested in art, history, politics and culture, chemistry and interesting trivia.