The Origin of Colour
The SCO asked me to paint Jay Capperauld’s new piece that they commissioned to open their 50th anniversary Season. You can hear the piece in person at their opening concerts. My paintings will be at the Edinburgh and Glasgow concerts. There is more info after the images of the paintings below.
These five panels are acrylic on aluminium. They are 50cm by 120cm. Jay’s piece reminds me of Marvel comics, or graphic novels, so I left a border around them to suggest this connection. The metal makes these pieces “live” in a different way from canvas or board. They look different depending on how the light hits them and then change depending on where you stand when looking at them. So seeing them in person is really special.
About ‘The Origin of Colour’ by Jay Capperauld
The Origin of Colour takes its inspiration from a short story in Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomicsseries (below) called Without Colours, which tells a surrealist tale of the creation of colour on Earth. In the beginning, the world exists in whites and greys where objects and people are shapeless entities bumping into each other in translucent static hues.
Suddenly a meteor rips through the sky illuminating the world for the first time highlighting purple chasms and orange mountains; earthquakes emit blue fluids to form the first oceans; the violet Sun sets for the first time; the first black night reveals the stars; newly formed pink clouds release golden lightning; post-storm rainbows are born and now the world is full of blue skies, yellow fish, green trees and red fires.
Calvino’s story is, above all, a love story between two characters who find and lose each other in the chaos of the Earth’s formation of colour. The dazzling quality of these new colours leaves one particular character in fear of this new world, and they decide to hide in a cave where colour did not reach. One final earthquake collapses the entrance to the cave leaving them isolated from their lover and the colourful new world on the other side.
Jay's new work is a real showpiece for chamber orchestra and attempts to capture Calvino’s creation story in a musical journey that maps the creation of colour on Earth from the hollow, translucent landscape described by Calvino to a kaleidoscopically vibrant worldwhich is both beautiful and terrifying in equal measure.
Jay Capperauld
photo by Euan Robertson