Mixing Colors

Painting is a funny sort of pastime. You learn things that you might not normally think about in terms of color. At it’s most basic, you’ve got red, yellow, blue, black and white. All colors can technically be formed from the combination of these colors. Where it gets really tricky is the amounts of each to throw into the mix in order to reach the desired hue. Where it gets even trickier is any time you add black and white. White is a lightening agent. Add white to red, and the red becomes a lighter shade of red. Add black, and it becomes darker. But what happens when you add too much black—which is not an uncommon occurrence because black is a surprisingly strong absence of color? You add white. But then, taking a step back, is it really grey which is responsible for hues? Granted, you might be able to reach the hue you’re looking for by just adding white, but this is extraordinarily rare, and one is generally left to deal with the color that results.

This is, however, why grayscale work is so important to the artist. It teaches them to deal with tone values, and if this were extrapolated on every so slightly, this is precisely what makes art what it is: the perfect tone. Joyce struggled with this. What’s the right tone for this episode? Your good chef is concerned with the not only the color tones on the plate, but the tongue tones as well. Jean-Paul Belmondo struggled with just the right tone of voice. Every artist is concerned with tone, and the best way to learn about it is an intense investigation into the grayscale.

However, there is an unfortunate point that some artists reach where their only interest is in grayscale, and they forget that the whole point of learning grayscale is so that one can make the leap into full color where the entire world of possibility opens up before their eyes. Grayscale teaches tonal understanding and makes tones possible, but it is, after all, a tool for moving comfortably into the world of infinite possibility. In a way, it could be said that grayscale is learning time.

Currently, I am reading four books—an old habit picked up from years of being in literature classes: Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness,” Beop Jeong’s “May All Beings Be Happy,” D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers,” and Voltaire’s “Candide” (and related texts), and I have noticed something that I never noticed when I was actually in school and studying books simultaneously. They are all individually crammed with information, but they are all coming together at some point in my head so that overarching "truths" can be reached.

Sartre is teaching me ontological awareness (and I want to point out that my mantra “actions reveal sub-conscious desires” has been somewhat amended by the understanding that our physical actions are a manifestation of ontological choices of what and how to be, where choice is a metaphysical action based on why we think we ought to do these things), the fact that to “non-” something is not the opposite of what it is we’re “non”-ing (where being and non-being are not opposites, action and non-action are not opposites, and knowing and non-knowing are not opposites because to non-be something means simply that you are not in that state, but it is possible, and for opposites this is never possible), and that a question is composed of three non-beings: the non-being of knowledge in man (otherwise why would you ask), the non-being of a possibly negative response (even in a question like, “Where is Paul?” the answer could be, “I don’t know”), and the third non-being of the limitation of truth. These three are non-beings because they are not currently in the state of being: there is no current state of knowledge, there is no current state of positivity or negativity—which opens up both possibilities, and there is no current state of limited truth.

From Beop Jeong I’m learning to live ever so fully from moment to moment, that the past is a thing to picked at when needed, the future is a thing to be understood as possible but untouchable, that possessions can own us as much as we own them, that words are the home of being, that life was intended for existence, and I am learning to ask “Who am I?” again and again and again.

D.H. Lawrence is teaching me just how far into the human psyche we can delve and what it is possible to learn about ourselves as we look back into ourselves from a position of understanding. I’m learning that love and hate can exist for the same character in the same paragraph, in the same breath, in the same sentence, and that it is sometimes uncomfortable to be that close, but that it is, in its way the same reality we all experience very day.

Voltaire is teaching me how to teach and learn through story telling. Candide’s travels and woes in this, the best of all possible worlds, reminds me that to cling to the things which we once thought beyond question can be only the mark of Emerson’s hobgoblin.

But, in the same breath, a moment to moment psychological existence where learning is key and “there is nothing to prevent consciousness from making a wholly new choice of its way of being” kind of makes sense.

In this moment, “Sons and Lovers,” “Candide,” “May All Beings Be Happy,” and “Being and Nothingness” are the gray which is tempering the hue of my understanding of my existence and my reality, which I am, in turn, attempting to live in hypercolor.

(For the record, I only just realized that Candide means pure or “white”—the existence of all colors simultaneously, beings being happy might be most happy in a nothingness where a bildungsroman can illustrate he psychological nature of a being who arose from nothingness. Two bildungromans, two books with being in the title, and all chosen randomly. Life’s funny like that…)

So maybe the best of all possible worlds is one lived with an understanding of grayscale, but focused on color. And maybe, when color gets to be too much, and you start to lose the plot, retreat back to the basics, but never forget that at the end of the day it’s always about mixing.