Still-life (part three)

The relationship between light and pigment colour was an important one to get across. In order to do this we would sometimes set up a white still-life that would be illuminated by spotlights with coloured filters attached.

As an introduction to this session, before the lights were turned on students would be told that the only thing we ever see is light, colour exists only in our minds.

An introduction was then given to the fact that pigments are chemicals that selectively absorb and reflect different spectra of light. This subtraction of wavelengths produces the appearance of different colours. Red, yellow and blue are the subtractive primary colors historically used by artists, which is something as a printmaker I was very interested in as it could be argued that cyan, magenta and yellow are more accurate subtractive primaries. I would have some examples of colours made by printmaking. For instance cyan and magenta overlapping produces blue (for a printer a secondary) and a yellow and magenta mix produces red, (another printer’s secondary). Cyan and yellow of course producing green, secondary for both artists and printers. Once the students were properly confused we set off to explain light.

Starting with the black box or area which would become the still-life, we would explain that this absence of light was also black. We would then add light’s primary colours, red, green and blue by switching the lights on one by one. As each light is switched on new colours are formed in the shadows. With the three lights we would make shadows of seven different colours: black, blue, red, green, cyan, magenta, and yellow. If you block two of the three lights, you get a shadow of the third color: Block the red and green lights, for example, and you get a blue shadow. If you block all three lights, you get a black shadow. And if you block one of the three lights, you get a shadow whose colour is a mixture of the two other colours. If the blue and green mix, they make cyan; red and blue make magenta; red and green make yellow. We would then take some objects out and move others around.

Once an interesting composition was in place the strange thing was that we would then have students working using their subtractive pigments (paints, pastels etc) to create images abstracted from the still-life. I used to find this counter intuitive, because all it seemed to do was to get already confused minds more confused. Some of the images were of course interesting and it made everyone aware that perceptually shadows are just as important as the objects that cast them.

There was sometimes at this point an extended conversation about ‘black’ light. Patrick thought you could have a black-light torch. I had an idea this was something from Flann O’Brien, it was I thought, perhaps a confusion Patrick had with the omnium, which in the Third Policeman, was contained in a black box. This was OK by me as I was convinced that what you might call ‘Pataphysical Fiction’, fiction such as that written by Alfred Jarry and Raymond Roussel, whose book Impressions of Africa had deeply influenced my own work, was one of the keys to how to understand contemporary art.

O’Brien and his molecule exchanging bicycles are no doubt behind the new definition of the omnium. For the 2012 Olympics the omnium as defined by the Union Cycliste Internationale consists of the following six events: a flying lap, points race, elimination race, individual pursuit, scratch race and time trail. I watched these races with intense curiosity, all the time expecting something miraculous to happen, something like a slight time shift or the actual realisation of bipolar mathematics and anti-gravitational shadow vectors as circling bikes created an antispace zero field. None of the athletes were tested for time dilation at the end of the event, only the standard drugs were searched for, perhaps there has been a cover up.

I digress, but only to point out how stories get elaborated and reality and art start sliding into and out of each other.

Back to black light. Another incoming at the time was ultra-violet also known as black light and therefore of great fascination to the foundation staff. This seems a bit naive now but at the time it felt exciting. If you turn on a black light bulb in a dark room, what you can see from the bulb is a purplish glow. What you cannot see is the ultraviolet light that the bulb is also producing. Our eyes can see visible light in a spectrum ranging from red through orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. Beyond violet is ultraviolet light, which we cannot see. So it is not outside the bounds of possibility that this ‘black light’, which does exist, could be actually used for all sorts of things, especially those sorts of things usually only found within the pages of science fiction books. Black light is normally used to stimulate radiated phosphor, I went to a Russian exhibit at last year’s Venice Biennale which relied on exactly this principle. It’s why your teeth glow strangely in some night-clubs lit by ultra violet bulbs. At that time we just showed people what happened when a bulb was turned on in the dark and everyone just went “wow!”.

Now dark matter is for real. You can’t see it but it is detectable by the bending of the light of the galaxies behind it.  When I was a PreDip student at Wolverhampton, Bill Kimpton, the then head would take us in small groups into his office and with a beautiful specially designed brass lantern, prism and metal slit demonstrate the splitting a light beam into its constituent colours, we would then be sent off to carefully copy the colours taken from sweet wrappers, soap boxes and pharmaceutical products. Science and art both full of wonder. Ars longa, vita brevis.