V. HOW TO USE COLOURS
Our world is beginning to re-discover colour.
After the drabness and sobriety of the 19th century, especially after the last decade of the twentieth, men awakened to a thirst for colour, in textiles, clothing, furnishing, advertising and illustrating as though in reaction to the bleak materialism of the preceding century, and to its aftermath in the horrors of war.
This path of discovery which was in a sense opened by Turner in the middle of the 19th century, has revealed itself in art, but not only amongst professional artists. Many brilliant amateurs have discovered that colour is an unending field of delight and discovery and are turning to painting for their own joy and satisfaction in middle and later years.
Amongst these one of the most notable, of course, is Sir Winston Churchill, who has enjoyed his terms out of office in the Nation’s affairs with great satisfaction in the study of painting. His delight in the colours is expressed characteristically:
“I cannot pretend to be impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones and am genuinely sorry for the poor brown ones. When I get to Heaven, I mean to spend a considerable time of the first million years in painting and so get to the bottom of the subject. But then I shall require a still gayer palette than I get here below. I expect orange and vermillion will be the darkest dullest colours upon it and beyond them there will be a whole range of wonderful new colours which will delight the celestial eye.”
With his genius for language, Sir Winston has chosen the right word. Only the ‘celestial eye’ should be recognised as a possession, not simply in the years after death, but here and now.
If we would but learn to use it! Where man has adventured other men may follow, and in so doing, discover something of the illuminating power of this celestial eye. G.W. Russell (“A.E.”) has termed it “The Candle of Vision”; (“The Candle of Vision”, by G-.W. Russell (“A.E.”) obtainable at 6/6’ postpaid from New Knowledge Books, 28 Dean Road, London, N.W.2), it is in fact the eye of the spirit possessed in germ by us all.
A friend once came to see me in a depressed state of mind. She wore a dress whose utilitarian drabness revealed her inward condition.
Life had become a round of perpetual “duties”, whose performance gave small satisfaction to herself Or to anyone else, but to which she was enchained by family conventions of behaviour. She felt it all foreign to her own real self, but had practically given up the struggle to assert herself, and was following a path of self-abnegation in a listless sort of way, which it seemed clear to me would only lead to illness.
I persuaded her to paint out of colour and followed this up by getting her to introduce colour into her garments. By the end of a couple of weeks she went home again in a greatly enlivened state of mind and the problems which had seemed insoluble were found to have partial solutions. She was able to satisfy her family’s demands on her and still have opportunity for a creative and colourful life of her own.
This is one only of many examples, of such cases of the revivifying effect of an enhanced awareness of Colour.
The impact of the nineteenth century on our own times is perhaps felt most severely in the kind of education most of us have had, which has concentrated on developing the intellect at the expense of those higher creative facilities which can only be awakened and trained through the arts.
This is a deprivation which can hardly be overcome in one generation, since the teachers of the present generation still suffer from the utilitarian aims of their predecessors.
But it can gradually be overcome by many individual awakenings. The impulse to such awakening comes frequently out of illness, the cause of which it would hardly be too much to say is a starved soul-life due to our mis-education in respect of the arts.
BECOMING MORE ALIVE TO COLOUR
What everyone can do for himself to correct this condition is to become more alive to colour in his own immediate environment, both in nature and in the environment created by man of interior decoration, lighting, etc., and in his own clothing.
There are signs that men are awakening to the drabness of their city and business clothing. American men have revolted at the uniforms of utility and already wear colours that would seem daring in Britain. The Continent is more colourful in the surviving influence of peasant dress than our industrial population manages to be. But there are signs that men are beginning to resist the uniform sobriety which has been the outward and visible sign of their subjection to the task of making money, and are beginning to demand not only comfort but also some cheerful notes of colour in their clothing.
These instincts of revolt should be encouraged, for the age of drabness in clothing has been only a comparatively short one, which, if one studies the period, was almost equally drab in every other idea. It was the age in which Agnosticism flourished; an age in which the satisfactions of the material world were apparently sufficient to make the question of a future existence of no particular moment; it was an age in which men, women and children could be sacrificed on the Altar of Mammon, re-named Human progress.
It is certainly not without significance that co-incident with these ideals the business man has spread the blight of industrial smoke over the country-side and the drab uniform of servitude on his own person. It is a condition which is fortunately changing through many individual revolts.
As regards environmental conditions, the problem is rather more difficult. Our streets and houses may be painted more gaily; that change is coming, if not already here. But the problems of interior decoration are more intimately concerned with the soul-life of the individuals who spend their time inside the dwellings or work-places and here what is needed is a greater awareness of how colour speaks, below consciousness, to us all, so that colours can be chosen wisely.
PAINTING OUT OF COLOUR
There is one field in which every man is his own lord and master and that is in the field of his own creative activity. He may never have learned in the art-schools, nor in the ordinary schools, to draw and to paint, but that is no great hindrance.
We can learn with great .joy and satisfaction to live with and create out of a sea of flowing colours. Anyone can do this.
All we need is courage, a pot of water and some brushes and tubes and then a sheet of white paper on which to begin to arrange this world of our own in which the colours shall flow, in which to do consciously in waking life what everyone of us does in sleep, e.g. to find the power of the creative self who lives in us behind our normal consciousness. It is not a plunge into a mystical heaven nor into a subconscious world of our own personal imaginings. But it is an honest effort to lift up into full consciousness that inner noble life of feeling and artistic sensibility which, as human beings, we all share and which only the dust of a century of materialism has overlaid. The sheet of white paper becomes for the time being the field of creative activity, into which we mirror each our own soul’s feelings and creative imagining.
What a plunge! Everyone shrinks back and says, “Oh, but I am not at all gifted; I do not know how to begin.” This is really a shocking admission for it is an indictment of our whole culture.
Everyone knew how to paint when he was a little child. Every little child paints joyously still – why did we leave it with our childhood? Because we were led to believe that it did not matter very much. Machines and motorcars drove out the colours.
But colours belong to the world from which we came, by which we live, and to which we shall return. The little ones know it because they have only recently left that world. We have so estranged ourselves that now we hardly dare enter. It is another world of experience but one that we need, most urgently, now!
Psychiatrists have discovered that by a process of ‘doodling’, or of letting hand and eye take their own path freely in black and white, or its equivalent in drawing and painting, they can encourage their patients to a kind of private confessional of their subconscious longings and desires. This can be helpful in diagnosis.
An inspector of education, in trying to discover the roots of a certain uneasiness she felt about present-day education, inspected herself, and came to the interesting discovery that there is hidden in us a creator who, given opportunity, is able to speak to us through the forms of art. In a book entitled intriguingly “On Not Knowing How to Paint”, J. Field described her adventures in discovering this unsuspected creator in herself and how free paintings produced pictures of significance, not only of import for her own self-realisation, but sometimes prophetic of future events, even of world events. Thus free painting became for her a path of investigation of unknown forces and of a spiritual awareness hidden in the depths of the soul.
Something similar is indicated in J.D. Dunne’s “Experiment with Time” New Knowledge Books, London. Here he recounts dreams where the future is forecast accurately twenty years before the event. These studies suggest that space-consciousness has been replaced by time-consciousness in the experience of dream.
There are many further implications in this, of course, which we will not at this moment draw. (For further implications of this discovery see “Goethe’s Conception of the World”, Rudolf Steiner. Anthroposophical Publishing Co., London). Only the indication that within us, every one of us, is a hidden Creator and knower, who saves us from many foolish actions in moments of crisis, by a sudden ‘hunch* but whom we effectively neglect in the larger part of our waking life in the pursuit of activities of seemingly more, but actually much less, importance for a full human life.
In “On not being able to paint” (from New-Knowledge Books, 28 Dean Road, London N.W.2), J. Field stressed the hunger for she knew not what, which beset all her early artistic studies. Art, as it was taught in the Art Schools did not satisfy. She could sketch a charming landscape hut reviewed it without satisfaction. Less than the thing seen, it also did not satisfy that creator urge in her which was seeking satisfaction. Whilst the first incompetent free painting which showed to her something unique and peculiar to her own inner striving being was satisfying in its uniqueness and at the same time enticed her with its inadequacy to further and greater efforts. By these means a path was open, of which no man could tell the end, a path of self-discovery towards new world-discovery.
Modern Sur-realist Art takes sometimes this direction but the results show it has some dangers. The colour world is the world of soul and there is a duality in the soul which reveals itself – as Goethe puts it:
“Two souls, alas! reside within my breast,
And each withdraws from, and repels, its brother.
One with tenacious organs holds in love
And clinging lust the world in its embraces:
The other strongly sweeps, this dust above,
Into the high ancestral spaces.
Not all revelation comes from above and painting that is swamped by the organic symbolism of dreams or the colours created by digestive activity may be interesting but can hardly be called art. This is the danger of the Freudian element in free painting, which can only be overcome by spiritual training and a growing awareness.
If one takes the path of objective colour study, something else enters from the outset. This world of colour is no private domain, filled with the demons or devas of the subconscious. Colour is that soul-element which we carry within us which rejoices with the coloured world around us.
We are living both in our own most lively creative power and in closest contact with the soul of Nature when we rejoice in and create out of colours. We steep our senses in the blue of the heavens, the green of the earth, the scarlet, yellow, magenta and violet of the flowers; the crimson glory of the sunset. The universe speaks to us through its colours. We breathe them in through the senses. It is an in-breathing which brings life to the soul.
But there is also an out-breathing. The soul rejoices in colour and creates out of its own coloured world. We become painters, painting out of colour, whether of the visible world or of the invisible world – it matters little. As painters we must weave between these spheres just as in ordinary life we sleep and wake and carry our dreams into earthly creating.
So, from the visible world we draw forth the ideas which its forms reveal, not imitating but creating, whilst from the worlds invisible in which we experience behind sleep, we bring forth longing to unite this world of colour with our daily life in forms of beauty.
The soul-world, which was lost from sight at birth, begins to draw nearer to our consciousness. This is no subjective fantasy. Poets, mystics, and artists from all time have known this ‘many coloured world’. To awaken to it in our own consciousness is to bring strength, certainty and healing into the whole of life, for therein we all are rooted. (See “The Human Soul in Sleeping, Dreaming and Waking”, P. W. Zeylmans van Emmichoven, M.D., New Knowledge Books, London)t
How should one start then to paint out of colour? If one paints a landscape, does one merely imitate the landscape in front of one, or does one paint one’s idea of the landscape?
Is one a better painter if one paints every twig and blade of grass before one in realistic detail, as Euskin would have us do, or if one paints a Nocturne in Blue like Whistler, or draws a bull-fight like Picasso, full of whirling forms, bits of horse, bits of ball, bits of human forms in turbulent struggle. The nineteenth century loved Naturalism and the 20th century seems to be striving to get at man’s inner responses to the outer world. If one has seen a bull-fight, Picasso’s drawings give a lively sense of the turmoil of feelings it excites. It is the “idea” of a bull-fight -not the bull-fight itself. Turner did something similar with his landscapes. In his early years he made clever and exact representations, frequently nearly monochrome. At the end of his life he painted them as colour and idea.
What then, if we, starting with colour, as the subject of the painting, let it grow into expression of an idea? It may sound fantastic but there is a reality behind it, the reality of the “many-coloured world”.
We belong to two worlds in our experience of waking and sleeping; in birth and in death we are as much at home in the one as in the other because it is only in our present stage of consciousness that they are two. In reality both worlds are one, “As we are born into it, we split our world in two”. Prom then onward “observation comes to us from the outside; the idea-world appears to us from the inner soul.” “I look at the visible world; it is everywhere incomplete. I myself with my whole existence have arisen out of the world to which the visible world also belongs. Then I look into myself and see just what is lacking in the visible world. I have to join together through my own self what has been separated into two branches. I gain reality by working for it.”
The artist works or plays between the visible world and the ‘many-coloured world’ -the world of the ideas seen by the inner eye. He is not deserting the visible world. He may be interpreting it, in terms of his inner experience, e.g. Picasso’s bull-fights, or he may be shedding the glory of the ‘many-coloured world’ over our ordinary work-a-day one. But the seed of his imaginative creating is his own. It exists neither in the one world nor the other. It is a new creation coming into being. For the seed of the universe is the creative spirit of Man. In man is the Christ-seed of a new Creation.
Knowing this creative spirit exists in we can trustfully take the path through colour.
We learn to know the colours one by one -to radiate with yellow, to condense into form with blue, to glow with the warmth of red. We live with the movements of the colours -breathing outward with yellow, drawing inward with blue. We become pedantic with green and courageous with orange and vital with red.
But there is no short cut to discovery of the creator within us. We have each to discover it through our own effort and colour is only one of the many paths to the spirit.
A ROAD TO THE SPIRIT
The painter builds the bridge of colour and beauty through the power of the inner eye. The scientist builds his bridges by an intellectual and spiritual penetration to the secrets of physical substance and forms; the priest builds bridges through the sacraments.
They all are bridges, or should be, across the Great Divide – the abyss that was created at birth, and which will be extinguished at death. In reality, however, there is no Divide, it exists only in our present day consciousness.
“We gain reality by working for it.” A high goal needs long and patient working. The way to achieve this goal is set forth in Rudolf Steiner’s many books and lectures and especially in “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds”. (Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., London, and Anthroposophic Press, New York. See also “Hygiene of the Soul”, New Knowledge Books, London).
It is the way of training by which man lifts his self-consciousness to world consciousness, his ego-life to the Christ-life, his body and soul to wholeness. It is a path through knowing, to wisdom, and through sensibility and compassion, to Love. It leads to full conscious awareness of the worlds of soul and spirit, which we otherwise enter only in shadowed consciousness at death.
Thus the path brings us to its end. Not all can build the bridges, but all can pass over them when built.
The third eye – the eye of the seer – perceives what one day all men will again perceive – the worlds of soul and spirit. Joy comes into us – joy, strength, certainty, and the power of healing. For to know our source is to clear the mirror of Self from all illusions, from all vanities, from all weakness.
It is to open the way for the great Sun-Spirit of Healing, the Christ, to let his Light shine in us, so that this shining Light may turn the darkness into colour, to lead us forward to the creating of a new heaven and a new earth — Now indeed, we are seeing “as in a glass darkly, but then we shall see face to face.”
—————