The Colour Red | emmamacey

Chapel Talk on the theme of Mind and Matter (The Colour Red)

Chapel, Winchester College

In the Dreamtime, swans were large, white birds. One day, two swans settled on a lagoon owned by the eagles. The eagles were annoyed and attacked the swans. They tore out the swans’ feathers and carried them into the mountains. The crows, who didn’t like the eagles, flew in circles above the dying swans. As they flew around, the crows dropped their own black feathers down over the naked swans to protect them. The swans, now covered in black feathers, recovered, but still carry red blood stains on their bills. The swan’s white feathers, which were scattered everywhere, grew into the white-flowered Christmas Bush, and their drops of blood became the Scarlet Heath.

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What is truly intoxicating about Aboriginal Dreamtime Stories like this one, is how spiritual beliefs are expressed in vivid metaphors. These stories are not recorded in text but are passed through the generations, relayed in ceremonies where the participants are adorned in ochre paints. It is no surprise that the stories are punctuated by vivid descriptions of colour as they are inspired by the ephemeral beauty of the landscape that shifts and changes with the weather and the seasons -the rusted ochre colour rock formations that turn midnight blue in the rain and the barren desert that turns to a white floral carpet as the rain subsides.

Colour is truly important to aboriginal people, and red ochre, the pigment used to depict the burning red desert and the blazing sun is both precious and sacred. It is an integral part of the initiation ceremony of young boys when they become men. In Arnhemland, for example, novices are smeared with ochre in sacred patterns on their chests. The red pigment is part of the secret of initiation and its mystery is bound in the ambiguity of its symbolism: red is the colour of blood shed in battle and represents conflict, it is the colour of menstrual blood and represents life, it is the colour of love, of death, of passion, of hate. Those of you who watch Winikies and don the commoner red will have some sense of what it means to wear red across your chest and be involved in an event that can never be justly explained to outsiders.

Aboriginal people valued precious red ochre so much that they would take pilgrimages to collect the pigment. In Goods From Another Country Isabel McBryde writes about Diyari men taking two months to travel a thousand mile round trip to collect red gold from the Bookartoo mine. The men would return home with 20 kilos of ochre each already wrapped into baked round cakes. Victoria Finlay who wrote the book Colour imagined that it would have been an impressive sight seeing these men with their pigment wrapped in kangaroo skin on their backs and their enormous grinding stones balanced on their heads trailing through the desert. The mines were so prized that when European farmers tried to settle on the land surrounding the mines in the 1860s, it led to a series of skirmishes known as the Ochre Wars.

In Europe, red was just as valued. The Roman Catholic Church adopted red as a colour of majesty and authority. It also played an important part in the rituals of the Catholic Church - it symbolised the blood of Christ and the Christian martyrs - and it associated the power of the kings with the sacred rituals of the Church. In Medieval painting, red was used to attract attention to the most important figures; both Christ the Virgin Mary were commonly painted wearing red mantles. If you look at the stained glass windows behind me, the red glass jumps out at you and is worn by some of the most important figures including the one at the very top of the image. When the sun shines behind the glass some of the colours dilute, but the red is strong and is not dulled by the strong light; it glows and illuminates like embers on a fire.

Only the brightest and most fervent red was used to depict biblical scenes and for many years, the most prized red was carmine, made from the blood of (kermes) beetles. The Romans valued it so much that they would sometimes demand that taxes should be paid in sacks of the beetles. During the Renaissance Period, much of the trade was controlled by the Spanish who harvested cochineal beetles from the Americas. In 1575 alone, over 80 tonnes of red arrived in Spain on what became known as the Cochineal Fleet and all over Europe red carpets, fabrics and cosmetics were manufactured.

The French sent spies to try and find out how and where the red was manufactured so that they could begin to compete against the Spanish market. But in typical British fashion, it was the English who accidentally discovered an alternative when a scientist called Drebbel knocked a thermometer containing cochineal dye onto a pewter window frame and it created a red dye, so he set up a dye factory in East London that manufactured the uniforms for Oliver Crowells ‘red coat’ army.

From this point forward, traders had to compete with scientists in the pigment trade and the number of available reds increased. But the new pigments were not always stable. English Romantic landscape painter, William Turner was renowned for using new and untested pigments in his work as he was more concerned with the way the image should look when he painted it rather than the conservation of the work in the future. Many of the people who purchased his paintings noticed that the images degraded and demanded that he repair them. He refused, reasoning that if he fixed one then he would have to fix all of them and would never have a chance to produce new work. And so, one of Turner’s famous images, the one that hangs in the National Gallery, the one that Turner called ‘My Darling’, of Nelson’s flagship Victory that he sailed in the Battle of Trafalger being towed away to be broken up is now a far different colour to what it once was. The Iodine Scarlett that he used to paint the vivid red clouds has now faded to a brown and while that may be an apt metaphor for the ship’s fading glory, it does seem a great shame.

Windsor Newton did it’s best to warn Turner of the consequences of using untried colours and sent him a range of pigments. Turner’s paint boxes are preserved in the Tate Britain, the RA and the Ashmolean Museum and have over a dozen kinds of red pigment. One of Turner’s favourite reds was vermillion. Pliny describes the making of this colour quite poetically as the result of an epic struggle between an elephant and a dragon. These two trouble -makers were always fighting, Pliny recounted, and the battle eventually ended with the dragon wrapping its coils around its heavy enemy. But as the elephant fell, it crushed the dragon with its weight and they both died. The merging of their blood made cinnabar, or vermillion. It is an apt metaphor for a very expensive paint which is made by combining heavy mercury and burning sulphur. Its chemical designation, HgS, indicates both elements are evenly matched. Combined, the silver elephant and the yellow fire-breathing reptile miraculously make something that is blood red.

While I would happily continue to talk about red all day, I think perhaps given that we started with an Australian story about the origins of colour, it is fitting that I end there, with a European story about the same thing so that I might finally address what I was asked to talk about- mind & matter.

It is not the matter or the pigment itself that is precious; it is what our mind believes it to be that is important. It is the enigma and the mystery that red is capable of representing. Isn’t it a thing of awe that pigment could so perfectly represent the dichotomies of life: passion and pain, love and desire, reverence and violence; these things are not tepid yellows or insipid greens, they are burning reds.

Bibliography:

Victoria Finlay. (2003). Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox, Sceptre; New Ed edition.
Spike Bucklow. (2009). The Alchemy of Paint: Art, Science and Secrets from the Middle Ages: Colour and Meaning Fom the Middle Ages, Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, 1st Ed.
Gallery 99. (Accessed: June, 2014). The Black Swans. http://gallery99.com.au/dreamtime%20stories/swans.html