III. COLOUR IN EVERYDAY LIFE
If we put out of our minds all theories or preconceptions of vibrations, wave-lengths and the like in connection with colour, what do we know of colour through the evidence of our own physical senses?
Let us give a. simple example of how colour speaks in ordinary life.
THE EFFECT OF GREEN AND RED
I travel by car along a country road through leafy woods clothed in the pale shimmering green of spring. There is a light rustling sound of wind among the branches, a light radiance in the opening buds, and the greenness conveys a feeling of cool contentment and promise of new life. On the road ahead of us is a red country ‘bus, flaunting its utility. By the roadside we meet first a red post-box, and later a telephone kiosk, both drawing attention to themselves through their redness. Then we spy two ladies crossing the road clad in crimson coats, and a child wearing a beret of flaming vermillion. These also do not wish to pass unnoticed.
An artist painting the woods would seize on the vermillion beret or the crimson coats as a touch of contrasting colour to enliven the green. He would probably prefer either to the red ‘bus or the red telephone box, unless he were a modem cubist painter. But he would not choose the ladies primarily for their personal charms, but for the enlivenment of a landscape through figures and for the way in which red enlivens green.
In such ways the painter lives into the the language of colour, as a matter of the technique of his profession. We all do something similar, but a little less consciously. And not all painters are very colour conscious.
If we look on green, abundant as in the green fields in spring time, we can feel two things – there is life, and also a certain innocent tranquility. The tranquility belongs to the green. A green meadow, a green tree, or leafy forest, green coloured walls in interior decoration, or green silk hangings or dresses.
HOW WE REACT TO YELLOW
Quite different feelings are invoked if the green is shot through with yellow different again if we have yellow itself, the bright yellow of spring daffodils or the golden yellow of a ripened cornfield, the flaming yellow of gorse, the pale yellow of a primrose bank or the yellow radiance of sunset. There is*an enhancement of life in the yellow, a joyousness-where the green leaves us tranquil, yellow shines like light itself. It would be difficult, to sustain a melancholy mood in a room coloured yellow. Either the mood would succumb to the yellow and we should become gradually more cheerful or, hugging the melancholy, we might feel inclined to leave the room – for the glow of yellow is consistently cheerful.
HOW BLUE AFFECTS US
Quite different again is the experience of the colour blue which we gain through our senses. Blue sky or blue sea or blue distance-all give a sense of spaciousness, something which draws us out of ourselves into a larger world. At its most intense, the blue of a summer midday sky gives us a feeling of dark immensity over-reaching all pettiness.
Blue gives us the tranquility of greatness, transcending small anxiety in an embracing peace. In its lighter hues, with white in it, blue has a gentle sportive cheerfulness, less active than the yellow.
These are all sensations we can have in looking at the colours, for which no theory is heeded, only direct experience.
The colours convey themselves to us, too, with a kind of inner gesture. Yellow shines towards us, much as children experience it when they hold a yellow buttercup under one another’s chins. It reflects like light, whilst blue has a constant elusiveness, a kind of mystery of withdrawal, it always moves further away so that one can never quite catch up with it. Whether it is the blue distance or the elusiveness of a bluebell wood, the blueness has a movement of withdrawal.
Red rushes at us like a fury, or flames sombrely or burns fiercely or with a fiery warmth, or glows with grandeur and power. It attacks rather than withdraws.
Thus each of the colours has some character of movement, but the movements are only qualities of the colour, not the colours themselves. The moods and movement of the colours give us the feeling that these have a direct effect upon us – they lure us out or drive us back or bring us to inner stability.
There is nothing in the wave-theory that explains such feelings. These are movements of a different kind, experienced qualitatively. They cannot be numbered or measured but are none the less real. We know this, through experience.
If one pursues this qualitative mode of thinking one can soon come to the idea that colour tells us something of the nature of a being, as the colour of a person’s skin can tell us whether he is well or ill, or the colour of the leaves on a tree tell us the progress of the seasons. We accept the information given by the colour, perhaps without conscious reflection.
No amount of reflection would bring us to the idea that what we experience qualitatively is merely an increase or decrease in the speed of vibrations or wavelengths. This quantitative mode of thinking lies outside the contents of the sense perceptions.
Goethe’s approach to knowledge was qualitative; his belief was that we should trust the senses as our means of knowledge and not depart from them into speculative theories.
Yet even on the path of qualitative thinking we still must go further if we are to find out what colour really is.
ARE DREAMS COLOURED?
Another much more brilliant colour world opens for us when we fall asleep, and again not all people are conscious of it. One often hears or reads discussions about whether dreams are coloured. Some people, even some painters, assert that dreams are in monochrome, like a photograph.
In such a way might the physical world appear colourless to a colour-blind person. Such people are fortunately not sufficiently numerous at present to make us doubt the reality of colour in the outer world. It could come, but it has not reached that point yet. But we can lose the colours of the inner world. In this sphere we are more colour conscious as children than in later years.
I remember dreaming as a child of three great tawny yellow lions, in a sandy reddish desert, against a brilliant blue sky. Nothing could shake my certainty thereafter that dreams are coloured, until in later life this awareness of colour in dreams, awoke again. Yet our faculty for perceiving colours the moment our eyes are closed, dies, if it is not cherished.
The converse is also true. My students often tell me that their painting lessons start them dreaming in colour. It is not a new faculty of course, for we all dream in colour. We only fail to remember it clearly enough. One student, who remembers having very clear colour experiences on the -threshold of sleep as a child, lost these for very many years, and was delighted when they lighted up again through her work with me in painting.
Does this matter? It does matter because, waking or sleeping, colour is the life of the soul. Our consciousness functions in two different spheres. But we are not two different beings, nor living in two separated worlds. Blindness to colour brings a dullness into the whole inner life, including the sleep life, for colour is the bridge we may most readily cross, from day waking consciousness to the consciousness at present hidden from us, behind sleep and death.
Parallel to this, our senses wake up, and everything around us lights up in colour, when we begin to pay attention to colour in our waking hours.
If we could carry this awareness further to spiritual seership, we could be aware of a transformed and glowing world, scintillating and radiant in every leaf and flower. What we normally see is dulled by our own rather dull senses.
One might then expect that all painters would dream m colour. That very many do is evident through modern sur-realist painters cultivating dream-consciousness as their inspiration. But the quality of their sleep or dream experience is influenced by the subjects they give attention to in waking life, be it form, colour, pattern, or dark and light.
The outer senses meet the inner, and what we take into the experiences of sleep is a kind of mesh of images mirrored into our consciousness through the day’s, and behind that through our life’s experiences. What we have experienced depends on how much the inner senses were awake..
The inner senses enliven the outer, and where one individual sees only a red post-box to remind him to post his letters, another sees how a red spot on the green background gives life to the greenness, a third sees how red rushes out from the greenness and almost attacks one with its insistence.
Similarly, the dream-life of different individuals of a like sensibility may be prosaic and colourless, dramatic and colourful, or imaginative, vivid and significant.
The two kinds of experience of sleep and waking are only one and the same individual’s life in its two aspects, and many a painter has not wholly escaped the darkened consciousness of his times, in seeing “objects in space” blankly as pattern and form, rather than qualitatively, in colour and significance.
RUDOLF STEINER’S TEACHING ON COLOUR
The moods and movements of colour as described are not merely subjective impressions. Anyone can experience the same, if they approach colour in an unprejudiced way.
These impressions tell us something of the objective nature of colour, but to approach a qualitative science as Goethe tried to do we must bring the objective perception to the point of perceiving general laws. For this we may turn to Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on Colour, (“Colour”, by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., London).
These lectures were in a sense only the beginning of such a science. Yet since all Goethe*s studies on the nature of colour were a foundation for Rudolf Steiner’s further investigations, this beginning was an important piece of work. To give the contents of these lectures briefly is hardly possible, and it is only through working with the thoughts given in a practical way that the psychologist, painter or physicist can understand and appreciate them.
For whilst Goethe, working from an inner certainty of vision, tried to build up a physical science which included the eye which sees, and the various forms of colour appearance, both subjective and objective, Rudolf Steiner carried the study further still.
Having a clear perception of the soul world of colour, he showed the way to such an understanding of colour, through feelings, in what we may term the waking day life of the soul.
Feelings have to be raised above the personal to the level of the super-personal to objective general truths.
Can this be done? Rudolf Steiner said it can and must, if we are to understand colour. Those of us who work as artists with his indications, find them both true and helpful. But much more needs to be done in this direction.
Dr. Steiner indicated how we can come to a closer understanding of colours and how to use them. He distinguished first between the colours in the sense of two kinds – lustre and image (glanz und bild), or the radiant active colours, and the colours that are not active in themselves but hold a given form. Thus red, blue and yellow are active lustre colours green, peach-blossom, white and black are image colours.
It is not too difficult to follow him when he defines green as the image of life, peach-blossom (e.g. human flesh colour) as the image of soul, white as the image of the spirit, and black as the image of the lifeless. These definitions correspond with ordinary human feeling. But to carry these definitions further, as he does, is more difficult to follow, and for this we must turn to the lectures themselves.
In such ways we may come to objective laws of colour which experience can support. But through the images of life, soul, spirit and death we also come to the borderland of what the physical senses perceive. Beyond that borderland the rainbow hues of colour still beckon us on.
Is the real nature of colour beyond the senses’ perceiving, or is it a call to awaken the senses to a more lively perceiving? Are we come to the point where colour is a gateway of the spirit, where the spirit through enlivened perceptions and thinking can cross the borders of the two worlds split apart at our birth?
If this is so, it will surely be comprehensible why Goethe, poet, philosopher, statesman and scientist, should, at the end of his life, say these words to Eckerman (see “Conversations with Goethe by Eckerman”, Dent):
“As for what I have done as a poet, I take no pride in it whatever. Excellent poets have lived at the same time with myself, poets more excellent have lived before me, and others will come after me. But that in my country I am the only person who knows the truth in the difficult Science of colours – of that, I say, I am not a little proud, and here I have a consciousness of superiority to many.”