Purple Prose (21 page)

I glance around the gallery, and from every wall the colour throbs in violet cloud and scudding shade. Purple cliffs appear carved from colour; flesh takes on form, and under its spell, eyes acquire depth, and fabric substance. My lungs fill with a shock of recognition. Mauveine! That magical purple effect I've always felt from Impressionist art, but couldn't ‘see' till now.

My mind flashes back to my seven-year-old self, falling under a different spell in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery; that of the Pre-Raphaelites whose purple melancholy and swoon-worthy scenes appealed to my English sensibilities. But Pre-Raphaelite purple is not at all mauveine; it's a sombre blend of madder root and cobalt blue, mixed on the pallet, according to tradition. Prior to this, purple was reserved to portray royalty, nobility and clergy, which is hardly surprising considering it took nine thousand
snails to extract a single gram of pigment.
²
The Impressionists on the other hand broke with standard practice and applied their colours raw from the tube to be mixed in the eye of the beholder. Both schools were popular at the same time, yet Russell's canvas has an entirely different feel from the moralistic tone of the Pre-Raphaelites.
Alpes Maritimes
is alive with the freshness of morning and a hazy promise that is at once soothing and uplifting. Sulphur and white impasto shrubs appear to radiate, but so do the purple pools of shade beneath, and I am mystified by this.

Until I discover the secret: colour complementarity. If you stare at a yellow Post-It, then transfer your gaze to a white sheet of paper, a purple replica magically appears like an aura on the page. Luminous and vibrant, it is the precise shade raining down on me now in a jacaranda blessing. I remember the first time I experienced its effects, not then knowing that I did. It was on one of those rare occasions when a major international exhibition came to the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth, in this case Monet. Of course, I had seen his haystack series in reproduction and never understood what all the fuss was about. But when I stood before those summer grainstacks, I was immobilised by the sheer physicality of their power. These haystacks, so like and yet unlike the ones I grew up with, emitted a gathering heat and brilliance that went beyond the thing itself. The left flank of each pyramid was a blaze of gold, its opposite asleep in purple. In the reproduction, if you cover the violet shadow with your hand, the sunlit side appears less bright. Uncover it, and the hayrick explodes with brilliance once more. I remember the canvas as enormous, but later discovered it was not.

So what were the Impressionists trying to capture? More than faithful reproduction, it was the effects of light in all its evanescent moods at different times of day and changing seasons. And more than that, it was, as Monet put it in the context of his haystack series, a desire to encapsulate, ‘instantaneity especially the “enveloppe”, the same light spreading everywhere …' In this he was driven ‘by the
need to realise what I feel', in other words what he called ‘sensation' or inner feeling,
³
and purple plays a vital role in this. For Johannes Itten, who taught at the Weimar Bauhaus with Kandinsky in the early 1900s, the tension between purple (as a cooler, secondary tone) and primary yellow creates an ethereal effect that transcends form.
⁴
This dynamic also evokes a sense of movement,
⁵
and for Monet, who speaks of light as Truth, this dance is as much an inner as an outer one.

The physics of colour was not understood until 1704 when Newton experimented by passing sunlight through a prism. Studying the resultant spectrum, he was struck by the absence of purple, so abundant in nature. By overlapping opposite ends of two spectra, however, he succeeded in generating ‘extraspectral purple',
⁶
a term I like for its otherworldly resonance. It also accords with my take on purple as a liminal shade and threshold between worlds. It was the colour of the velvet cloth wrapped around the book of koans my Zen teacher would uncover when gifting me the next conundrum to wrestle with in meditation, a koan in the Japanese tradition being a word or phrase to contemplate on the way to enlightenment. These are threshold words designed to take you from the world of everyday things into the essential nature behind them. The book was called
The Gateless Gate.
I remember the womb-like feel of the room with its diminutive Buddha and mauve lisianthus cast like genies in a candlelit forest. And the grief of my disintegrating marriage contained by the poetry and pain of each koan as it bled into my life:
Mountains and valleys are different, the moon and the clouds are the same
. And all felt strangely blessed.

For the Impressionists, purple was such a mediator between light and the world of objects, or form. Itten, one of the last colour theorists to write on the dynamic interplay of colour, states: ‘Colors are the children of light, and light is their mother. Light, that first phenomenon of the world, reveals to us the spirit and living soul of the world through colors.'
⁷
Artist and colour therapist Liane Collot d'Herbois similarly describes violet as a bridge between
the physical and spiritual,
⁸
between object and essence. One image from the Melbourne exhibition that demonstrates this with particular poignancy is that of Mrs Russell amid a florescence of colour in the garden at Belle-Île. With her golden hair framed against a bank of purple cloud, it seems to presage her untimely death, the violet tones of the sky echoed in floral shadows below.

Goethe, whose
Theory of Colours
(1810) influenced Itten, d'Herbois and the Impressionists themselves, classifies the violet-purple spectrum as ‘unnecessary',
⁹
which is disappointing coming from a poet and philosopher. Even the physicist Newton saw colours as vibrations like the seven notes on the musical scale,
¹⁰
and I have read that purple translates to C, B sharp.
¹¹
Something I could have verified, if I'd ever thought to ask, with the synaesthetic Zen teacher who had a penchant for ruined pianos. Personally, I don't hold with Goethe when it comes to purple. To me, it is vital, and there are days when nothing else will do; when red feels too abrasive, blue too distant and cool; then I reach for purple to contain and uplift with its paradox of lightness and depth.

My purple coming of age was that first pair of bell-bottoms immortalised in a photo my boyfriend Pete took when he visited me in France. There I am
–
a heliotrope splash amid waist-high, pink-tipped grass, gazing into the valley mist of a small chateau. All suitably impressionistic, thanks to the blurred effects of the Kodak Instamatic. It is a colour I associate with Pete for his trademark purple jeans, a permanent fixture in university days, often worn with the rose damask shirt or white tracksuit top. There I am at eighteen perched on the handlebars of his bike, those plum-coloured legs angling in and out of my vision as we wobble along Aberystwyth Prom. I picture us, an oasis of colour beneath Welsh slate roofs and glowering skies, breaching puddles thrown by a steely sea. We sing ‘Raindrops are falling on my head … crying's not for me …' and think we are invincible. I marry him, of course.

And I have had my own Mauve Decades, albeit measured out in months, when its variety of shades sustained me through
motherhood and illness, marriage breakdown and divorce. Particular favourites were the purple cords and matching two-tone jumper purchased in haste when Simon had nodded off in the pram. It was ideal: warm, vibrant and fashionably ‘cool'; it detracted from that sleep-deprived, harassed mother-of-two look, lending a deceptive glow to my skin. It nourished me, so that I in turn could nurture and love. I have a vivid memory of this outfit, worn for the last time on holiday in Wales when Simon was four. There I am lying in a hollow on the slippery Welsh grass under a sparse tree in weak sun, resplendent in purple. A remembered moment of deep peace I return to during relaxation after yoga, or whenever I need to centre myself.

The Impressionists took to mauveine with characteristic aplomb, yet also experimented with other new chemical dyes like magenta and solferino, both named after Italian battles, reflecting the turbulence of the period. These came on the market in 1860 and are evident in Russell's
Alpes Maritimes
as variants of gold and mauve. More hues followed, outstripping any modern-day Dulux chart for fanciful nomenclature; ‘excited-thigh-of-nymph pink', for example, and ‘caca Dauphin', which I venture to translate as ‘Prince Regent poo'.
¹²
But I digress …

The Impressionist revolution was through the medium of colour, breaking with the prescriptive use of dark earth tones and pale contrast espoused by the Académie Royale to embrace the full colour spectrum. Theirs was a rebellion against the formulaic imperative of idealised subject matter and form derived from mythological, religious and classical texts. Rather than reconstruct from memory in the studio, they worked outdoors,
en plein air,
the better to absorb the capricious moods of nature, and purple is key in capturing the atmospherics of light and distance, heat haze and mist. From the NGV exhibition, Russell's and Monet's
Belle
series are memorable, their shimmering purple-mauves combining with green and white to convey sea spray, lichen rock and that cool northern light. Viewed side by side, the influence of the older man
on the young Russell is evident, and the effect is subtle, but real, as though I too am out in the open, far from a Melbourne gallery.

More than a school, the Impressionist movement was a state of mind, diametrically opposed to the black and white, chiaroscuro mentality of the established order which was now being challenged in the wake of the Industrial Revolution by the rise of a new middle class. The Impressionists applied colours directly and in juxtaposition to
suggest
rather than dictate form, sculpting shape with paint. The effect is to engage the beholder, not just optically as colours blend on the back of the retina, but also emotionally as we receive the ‘sensation' or feeling behind the work; the essence that moved the artist to engage with the scene. Oils were layered in thick, deft strokes of broken hue to meet the moment, with no attempt to conceal brushwork. The results were considered shocking, and the artists often condemned as careless, puerile or mad.

The Impressionists were not bound by colour theory, even though they were influenced by it, for theirs was an intuitive aesthetic, affording them the liberty of discovery through experimentation. Pete and I tried this along with our two boys after enrolling them in the Steiner school. Like the Impressionists, Rudolf Steiner was a follower of Goethe and his ideas on the psychology of colour. So, there we are, the four of us, Pete, the children and I, seated on Goldilocks chairs at a baby-bear table splashing primary colours onto thick wet paper. Yellow is my colour of choice, which apparently means I'm sanguine – lighthearted and easily distracted. Pete is red, of course – choleric, and a bold man of action. Simon, too, is red, and Francis blue – the ever-thoughtful melancholic. Chasing instinct, I daub on sunshine paint, watching as the feathery fingers creep towards the corners, not quite filling the space like Pete's, and later drying out in a pallid blur. I try again, converting to blue, but in each case never quite resolve that tension between surrender and control.

My Zen teacher once described this in a meditation context as trying to ride an unbridled horse, mounting first this way, then the
other and falling off anyway. Which is exactly how it felt in that tiny room with the swaying Buddha as I struggled to demonstrate my insight:
the sound of one hand, the mountains, the valleys – all different and the same.

One of the paintings that stands out in my mind from the Melbourne exhibition is Russell's
The Garden, Longpré-les-Corps-Saints
(1887), depicting spring trees in bloom. Overwhelming in size and luminosity, its branches stream upwards and away beyond the canvas, the mauve blossoms of the foreground backlit by splashes of gold that could be foliage or light, and impressionistically both. Purple shadows on the central trunk are echoed in the garden wall and lithe silhouettes of distant trees, the whole contained within green and mauve undergrowth and a patch of celadon sky. Mauve petals tumble from the tree like firecrackers and my heart expands. So,
this
is how it feels to ride the horse! It brings tears to my eyes.

Russell knew only too well that painful tension between subjective expression and close observation of a reality ever in flux. Along with fellow artists Monet and Van Gogh, he was drawn to oriental philosophy, recognising kindred spirits in the Japanese artists of the
ukiyo-e
, or floating world, school who burst onto the scene in 1867 at the Universal Exposition in Paris.
¹³
Theirs was no lofty vision of an afterlife or the heroism of battle, no romantic idyll or mythological fantasy, but the depiction of the here and now. What in Zen terms is encapsulated in the act of chopping wood and carrying water as enlightenment itself. Here for the first time were artists showing ordinary people in the natural world of mountains and water, flowers and trees.

Monet was particularly enamoured of Hokusai (1760–1849), acquiring six of his famous woodblock series depicting Mount Fuji at different angles, seasons and times of day. He studied the
ukiyo-e
style down to brushstroke details and colouration, including the use of cool and warm colour contrast to suggest the play of light, atmosphere and mood, a dynamic, according to Itten, capable of transcending form.

For Monet, and Russell who was influenced by him, yellow and purple were their contrast twins of choice, the latter being especially prominent in the later works of Monet's lily pond series. Many of these paintings are awash with mauve to the extent that he has been suspected of having ultraviolet vision. When I first read this, I was intrigued but sceptical, until I heard an interview on ABC Radio National's Science Show with physicist Helen Czerski who confirms that the all-pervasive purple blush in Monet's later works – ostensibly those enormous water lily canvases – faithfully represents the world as seen through an ultraviolet lens. Or no lens, in Monet's case, who at the age of eighty-three had it removed from his right eye in a cataract operation. True scientist-cum-artist that he was, Monet resumed his colour experimentation, painting the same water lily scenes, first with a (cataract-ridden) left-eye view of reds, yellows and browns, and then in a striking dance of purple, mauve and violet through his ultraviolet right.