Color

Pierre Bonnard, Table dans un Jardin, 1908

On a night in August in the late 1960’s, Dad rowed out to the middle of the lake after dark. I was there, along with my youngest sister and brother. The auroras hung around us in sheets and curtains of green and bluish pink with undertones of golden light. Like firework showers that didn’t go away. We didn't say much to each other. The experience was so overwhelming. We had often seen auroras as shimmers of green on the far side of the lake. But to be in the middle of it, the sky over our heads hung with shifting clouds of color, was astonishing.

Dad was primed to observe the intense auroras caused by solar particles interacting with the gases surrounding the earth. And, perhaps because I didn’t get up to the lake much when I was in college, I recall being a privileged guest in the boat on this spectacular night. David was probably nine and Ann five. They had been at the lake all summer. It wasn’t warm, as I remember us wearing jackets. It was way past bedtime, but we stayed out as long as possible, watching the colorful sky dance.

Sometimes, in my memory, this experience hardly seems real. And yet, I am sure of it. Weeks in the woods beside the lake were full of intense color. The wet greens of the deciduous trees and undergrowth, the dryer colors of the evergreens at the height of summer; all of it giving way to subtle changes as our hemisphere tilted more to the north. The lake reflected the sky: glassy green with the wind whipping up whitecaps when it was overcast; more blue and yellow green in the sun with the white cumulus drifting over it; still and pale in the early morning and evening, reflecting clouds and sun paths to an observer.

Nature always gives us an experience of harmonious, intense colors. It can do nothing else than provide our observant human eyes with the spectrum which the sun and other natural lights reflect from surfaces. We also find things made with natural materials and pigments pleasing in color. Nothing in nature clashes as garish and strident man-made colors often do.

Our place on the globe subtly affects color. Moving only about three degrees, 43 second south in latitude, from the San Francisco area to Los Angeles, we notice differences in sky color and vegetation, though these are affected by many things in addition to latitude. In the north I didn’t notice the intense lavenders of the evening sky as much as I do in the south, for instance. And, although both places are some degree of desert, native vegetation in the south is more sparse and spikey, even more grey-green.

When I moved from the more European-influenced Midwest to the west coast, I noticed that characteristic man-made colors also differed according to longitude. Pacific-influenced colors, it seems to me, are not the rich, full-bodied reds, blues and purples we see in European stained glass. Colors around the Pacific have more grey in them.

Christopher Alexander, the great British/American architect, gives much attention to color in the fourth book of his series on The Nature of Order [published 2004]. Alexander, who spent his life trying to infuse the crude man-made world with wholeness and beauty, built few buildings, but documented them in books. He writes, “Reality as we experience it is full of color, saturated by color, dominated by color at every turn, in every point, in every line, in every shadow. And life is especially influenced by color. Indeed, color is one of the few aspects of wholeness where we experience wholeness directly, because the sensations of color are not analyzable into parts.”

In his work with color, Alexander tried to give it an inner light. He felt that “the experience of inner light reveals an ultimate world of existence as it really is, perhaps, and shows us a glimpse of a reality which is more profound, more beautiful, than the one we experience every day.” The “perhaps,” is his characteristic scientific skepticism showing. But Alexander took on a very large project. He wanted to overturn the value-free Cartesian, mechanical world-view, which robs us of awe and wonder, and replace it with a world-view which has a value for wholeness at its core. You can explore his life and work here.

Having grown up in practical farming communities, in which reality was more pinned to a sensual world than it is now, but also one in which there was a great deal of room for mystery and wonder, I have been very open to Alexander’s program. There is a great deal of depth, however, in contemporary discussions of color, as Don tells me.

In 1931, the Commission Internationale de l'éclairage, devised the first definition of standard color spaces, which are used in inks, paints, and illuminated devices such as digital cameras and monitors. Experiments using human observers are the basis for this definition, which has been subsequently revised in 1964 and 1976. Don gets deep into these color definitions when color-correcting movies. He obviously prefers “scene-referred” work, in which color is calibrated to the scene that was being photographed, to “display-referred” work, in which hues are chosen by how they look on a monitor.

After cataract surgery provided me with new lenses, I am proud to now have the “standard observer” experience of color myself. The old lenses, which were removed, had a yellowish film on them. For a few days after my surgeries, I reveled in the exquisite new colors of the world. But then my brain got used to them, and it didn’t seem unusual any more.

I have been fascinated by the part color plays in my sister Solveig’s life. Though she is now bed-ridden and only able to move her head due to progressive multiple sclerosis, her room is always filled with flowers whose colors “feed” her, as she says. She is able to eat and communicate, and responds strongly to the colors people around her wear, as well as those she sees in photos. Her Instagram posts (helped by others) are a riot of colorful flowers.

My own color choices are subtle. I often opt for a subdued color instead of the strange, eye-popping dyes we sometimes see applied to plastics and polyesters. I do find myself making choices about where to spend my time which reflect Alexander’s value system. Natural colors and materials are always part of the harmony I seek. “Inner light” is certainly visible, on certain valued occasions.

My Dad remains an example to me, in that he continued to be perfectly grounded in his Christian faith but was also very open to emerging science. I find the place Alexander assigned to color in his cosmology still mysterious. But like my Dad, I have quite an ability to hold various questions open, as science must.