Dissolution: the Matter of Colour

A group exhibition.

“The dampness of watercolours made the paper buckle unpleasantly and the wet colours would run together; on occasion it would be impossible to get rid of some extraordinarily tenacious Prussion blue - no sooner would you get a small bit of it on the very tip your brush than it would already be running all over the enamel in the box, devouring the shade you had prepared and turning the water in the glass a poisonous blue. There were thick tubes with india ink and ceruse, but the caps invariably got lost, the necks would dry up, and when he pressed too hard the tube would burst at the bottom and thence would come crawling and writhing a fat worm of goo. His daubings were fruitless and even the simplest things-a vase with flowers or a sunset copied from a travel folder of the Riviera-came out spotty, sickly, horrible.”

Vladimir Nabakov, The Defence

“…she cried out that the car’s boundaries were dissolving, the boundaries of Marcello, too, at the wheel were dissolving, the thing and the person were gushing out of themselves, mixing liquid metal and flesh. […] she mustn’t ever be distracted: if she became distracted real things, which, with their violent, painful contortions, terrified her, would gain the upper hand over the unreal ones, which, with their physical and moral solidity, pacified her; she would be plunged into a sticky, jumbled reality and would never again be able to give sensations clear outlines.”

Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“[…] the outline represented the world of fact, of separate touchable solid objects; to cling to it was therefore surely to protect oneself against the other world, the world of imagination. So I could only suppose that, in one part of my mind, there really could be a fear of losing all sense of separating boundaries; particularly the boundaries between the tangible realities of the external world and the imaginative realities of the inner world of feeling and idea; in fact a fear of being mad.
[The] idea of the very eye which sees being lost, drowned in the flood of colour, sounded all right, as long as it was a coloured state of grace and one did rise again. But supposing one did not? And supposing that it was not a picture but a person that was loved like this? As yet I could not see very far along this way, but later it was to become clear that some of the foreboded dangers of this plunge into colour experience were to do with fears of embracing, becoming one with something infinitely suffering, fears of plunging into a sea of pain in which both could become drowned. At present, however, I only knew that there was some unknown fear to be encountered in this matter of colour…”

Marion Milner, On Not Being Able to Paint

• http://www.fiveyears.org.uk/archive2/pag...