Colour or Black and White?

With a wide spectrum of hues, shades, and tones, artists have long sought meaning in both colour and its thoughtful absence.

SH Raza, Rajasthan, 1961

Whether or not one thinks they understand art, to most, it is synonymous with colour. The paint-dabbled artist’s palette is a universal symbol for Artist. “Colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet,” said Paul Klee whose art overflows with ideas and energy, always exploring new frontiers, and through it all, was grounded in colour. “Colour has taken possession of me... it has hold of me forever... Colour and I are one,” he gushed in his diary, giddy with enthusiasm after visiting sun drenched Tunisia in 1914. Claude Monet’s Waterlilies – dreamy vistas of floating colour, painted from his garden in Giverny, place us in a sublime state of mind. “What keeps my heart awake is colourful silence,” he said.

Zarina Hashmi, Letters From Home, 2004

Cave artists used just a few colours made from readily available materials – charcoal or soot for black, burnt shells or powdered gypsum for white, haematite for red ochre, limonite for yellow. Ancient Egyptians used natural pigments for their vividly painted tombs, sculptures, and jewellery, and invented a synthetic blue. Greek statues that we now see as white were, in their time, colourfully painted. Material for making colour is everywhere – kitchen staples like coriander leaves, onion skin, and blueberries would provide for a landscape painting.

Colour theory is an essential part of an artist’s knowledge base. There are primary, secondary, and tertiary colours. There are cool, warm, and neutral colours. Psychologists and advertising agencies have figured out which colours affect moods and which ones make you want to buy another burger. Cultural associations are tied to the colours of clothing and flowers. Art history at some level, is the story of colour through the ages – how it was made, how it was used, what it represented, what ideas it helped the artist convey, and what it made the viewer feel. Henri Matisse said, “With colour one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft.” The circle of dancers in La Danse (1910) embody this energy even with a limited palette of warm red nude figures against a cool blue-green background of field and sky. Fellow Fauvist Paul Gaugin used a similar palette and said, “Colour! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams.”

Light and air exploded on the canvas with the work of the Impressionists, who introduced bright colours into a previously darker, subdued palette. There has been no looking back. Technology made a riot of colours available to the artist and they used them joyfully. Colour field paintings by artists such as VS Gaitonde or Mark Rothko were straight-out meditations on colour, with no-nonsense titles such as Rothko’s Orange, Red, Yellow. These works presented the possibility that colours themselves had the ability to contain or unleash emotions. In the 1960s, SH Raza embraced Gestural Abstraction with unrestrained brush strokes that were made with seeming abandon. He titled one such painting Rajasthan, using warm reds, ochres and greens to evoke the forests and heat of India – an ode to his homeland from an artist living in the cooler climes of France.

Some decades later, Raza made a few black and grey paintings centred around the spiritual bindu, saying, “The black space is charged with latent forces aspiring for fulfilment.” One of the best-known monochromatic works is Picasso’s 1937 Guernica mural, painted in black, white, and many shades of grey. The impact it makes is as much due to its massive scale, as for its restrained colour palette. What makes an artist refrain from using colour in their work? British philosopher Bertrand Russell claimed that, “The painter has to unlearn the habit of thinking that things seem to have colour… and to learn the habit of seeing things as they appear.” Late 18th century Spanish artist Francisco Goya had already mastered this art of observation, saying, “In art, there is no need for colour; I see only light and shade.”

Akbar Padamsee made twelve grey paintings in the late 1950s and never painted with this limited palette again. During a conversation in 2016, I asked him, why the self-imposed restriction to black, white and grey? To which he replied somewhat counter-intuitively, “Because I wanted to understand what colour means. It is a thought process. To construct a painting, you have to understand colour, space, object… the thinking happens in the mind.” Did he miss colour? “No,” he said, “because I knew that after this, I would use colour in my next paintings. It was there.”

Colour is here, there, and everywhere around us. And yet, some art traditions have been built on the value and expressive power of a single colour. There’s little that can match the fluid, poetic, black inkwash of Chinese landscape paintings, which almost force a second colour to justify its presence. Modern artist and printmaker Zarina’s minimalist paperworks are capable of evoking memories of her homeland, much like Raza, but in her case, were prints, devoid of colour.

So, colour or black and white? Sometimes, less can be more.

(Meera is an architect, author, editor and artist)