THOUGHTS / On The Colour Green
“Oh, look! There’s Emerald City! Oh, we’re almost there at last! At last!
It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Just like I knew it would be.”
Olafur Eliasson, Green River, The Northern Fjallabak Route, Iceland, 1998.
Green is arguably the most enigmatic colour, reassuring and unsettling in equal parts.
It spans the verdant hues of floppy poplar boughs, undulating fields of late summer corn, soft whispering grasses and plump mossy knolls, and the peaceful Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku (or forest bathing), which has been part of the national health programme since 1982, and encourages and meditative experiences in verdant woodland spaces for restorative health benefits.
But these comforting impressions and effects of nature and landscape meet uncomfortable phrases of the ‘green-ey’d monster,’ strange literary figures like The Green Knight (titular adversary of Gawain, of whom artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins has made some excellent screenprints), mottled histories of social unrest and absinthe, and the deadly arsenic laced decor of Victorian drawing rooms (courtesy of Scheele’s Green).
Clive Hicks-Jenkins, The Exchange, screen print, 550mm x 550mm, depicting scenes from Sir Gawain & The Green Knight.
Morris & Co. daisy wallpaper, 1864, one design of many in Morris’ popular line of wall coverings, rugs, and textiles which were produced using toxic Scheele’s green and Paris green.
Edgar Barclay, May Day, 1898
Over centuries, green has been understood and employed in different ways. It has long been associated with growth and gardens; it is the leaf-coloured robes in the garden paradise of the Quran, the emerald Mount Qaf in medieval Islamic poetry, and it is associated with rituals of spring in western culture, such as an old May tradition of donning a green leafy crown, garland or green clothing. But, equally, it was taboo, courtesy of colouring-mixing prejudice and restrictions in medieval years, bad luck to wear it on the Shakespearean stage, and associated variously with the demonic and toxic (with the now infamous nineteenth century copper arsenide pigments). On the bright side, there has always been the four leaf clover!
Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), The Montagne Sainte-Victoire with a Large Pine, around 1887, The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust) © The Courtauld
Henri Matisse, Paysage: Les genêts (Landscape: Broom), 1906
Paul Gauguin, Lilacs, 1885, oil on canvas.
Monet in his garden at Giverny.
Artistically, green has been used predictably naturalistically for pastoral and bucolic scenes, but also figuratively, by painters from Constable and Monet to Gauguin and Matisse, and many artists in between. More recently, the colour has been employed unexpectedly, changing fundamental natural things such as light and water to seem unnatural. Green in light can be eerie or transformative - immediately extra-terrestrial landings come to mind. Artist Bruce Nauman’s Green Light Corridor (1941) which forced the viewer into a discomfiting state through a tight green-lit passage, after such exposure the eyes reacted by switching to see pink. Green water too has had this transformative power.
Bruce Nauman, Green Light Corridor, 1970, wallboard and green fluorescent light
Olafur Eliasson’s Green River Project (first in Germany in 1998) used the colour green as a catalyst to draw viewers into a new relationship with their surroundings when he dyed the river a lurid and luminous shade of hyper-real green with a non-toxic powder (uranine), toying with ideas of pre-knowledge and perception. Green here was a vehicle for radical re-thinking, for stopping and re-engaging with the world, for building new relationships and connections with everyday environments.
Olafur Eliasson, Green River, 1998 (Moss, Norway, 1998)
Also dealing with perception and possibility, the loose, figurative paintings of contemporary artist Amy Beager tread an ambiguous space of narrative and imagination, dancing between dream and reality, with top-to-toe greens employed strikingly to depict her poetic and romantic subjects.
Amy Beager, Locket, 2021, acrylic, oil and collage on canvas, 80 × 60 cm
To some, the colour green has been representative of silence (Pablo Neruda), subtle artistic temperament and decadence of morals (Oscar Wilde), the most restful colour, bordering on tedium (Kandinsky). For others, it is the prime colour of the world, and that from which its loveliness arises (Pedro Calderon de la Barca), more glorious than gold or silver (Martin Luther) and most treasured;
“Nature’s first green is gold.”
For us, and many, it is the colour of nature, of power, and of possibility. The hieroglyph for ‘green’ in Ancient Egypt was the highly regarded papyrus stalk. It is fresh, lush, expectant and energetic. Like ‘The Green Man’ it is a symbol of nature and regenerative potential. It is foundational and grounding. The passage of time in our year is tracked by the evolution of greens, with each season holding a dominant shade. There are the acidic, bright greens of spring; the grassy, vibrant greens of summer; the earthy, faded greens of autumn; and the dark, fir and forest greens of winter. Green itself has an annual lifecycle of emerging, living, fading and being reborn.
A late Roman 6th century mosaic of a Green Man exposed, Great Palace Mosaic Museum, Istanbul
There is also an element of mystery in green, of unpredictable growth and change, and of transience. Green is out there and all around us, omnipresent, and yet difficult to capture and pin down. It is always changing. For years, it was similarly one of the most frustrating pigments for artists; when artists attempted to harness it (terre verte for example) it was dull and incomparable to artistic intentions and aspirations, lacking luminosity, and it was frustratingly mutable. Its beauty, Leonardo Da Vinci warned, “vanishes into thin air” and a Dutch artist lamented,
“I wish that we had a green pigment as good as a red or yellow. Green earth is too weak, Spanish green too crude and ashes [verditer] not sufficiently durable.”
Daniel Smith watercolours
The verdigris made from oxidised copper or bronze was unstable and prone to blackening, and verditer lacked durability. Paolo Veronese did get around this by applying three different green pigmented in two layers and layer of varnish on top to prevent them reacting.
In some ways, this intangible, transient quality of green makes it an apt colour to represent life and life force, in its physical and material sense - where blue feels more spiritual. In etymology its Latin word is ‘viridis,’ close to ‘vis’ strength and ‘virere’ to be vigorous, ‘vir’ man and it is linked to the Old English verb “growan”, which means “to grow”. It is the colour we see most shades of, with the largest wavelength range in the visible spectrum for humans at between 487to 570 nanometers (nm). Further, when adapted to darkness eyes are most sensitive to light at 507 nm, and when adapted to light they are most sensitive to light at 555 nm, both firmly in the green zone. Yet most of the greens around us are evanescent.
Perhaps that is the reason why in the 1970s it became the preferred choice for eco-minded organisations such as Greenpeace and The Green Party, harnessing the predominant colour of nature but also reminding us of the sensitive, changeable natural world around us that we must attempt to comprehend and conserve.
“It is beautiful to the eye, but does not last.”
Brice Marden, Holbein, 2016-17, oil on linen
Brice Marden, Winsor & Newton, 2016-17, oil on linen
Perhaps one of the most striking contemporary uses of green has been Brice Marden’s minimalist paintings which he exhibited at the Gagosian in London in 2017. An extension of his earlier 1970s Grove works, these mystical, high-intensity works explored the expansive possibilities of one colour - terre verte. Terre verte is an iron silicate/ clay pigment, which was often used to balance flesh tones in the Renaissance. Marden utilised 10 different brands of the pigment, all with different hues, layering them up, contrasting their transparency with their intensity. The works, all identically sized, allow a contemplative meditation on earth and colour. They seem like inverted landscapes in which the colour both reveals itself and evades the viewer.
“For still there are so many things that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring there is a different green.”
In this, green is part of embracing life in all its mutability and transience, vitality and unpredictability, recognising its strength, fullness and omnipresence, it is our colour of acceptance, potential for regeneration, green is a celebration of humanness, asserting humanity (or the human condition) as much as it does nature. Like The Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, it is a beautiful dichotomy, visible and invisible, magic and instability, hope and illusion in equal parts.