The Library of Obscure Wonders

 I always see Thursday as green. I’m told this is a type of synesthesia. This picture I made from recycled Mills&Boon romance novels. It is loosely about lost love on a Thursday evening. I had a private view of my work that night, my boyfriend at the time came along as it ended and brought me a bunch of white roses. They looked unwell. I think we both knew it was over. The green of the leaves didn’t look quite right to me, and was much more noticeable than the flowers themselves. It was a messy London Thursday goodbye, an oldness pretending to be young.

On the visible spectrum green is the colour between blue and yellow. In painting it is considered a secondary colour because it can be mixed from the primary colours of blue and yellow. Green is middle of our colour range. It contains no red, no ultra-violet or infer red, it is just green.

Looking at the colour green has been found to help with cancer. The people of the rainforest are said to have very many words for green. If you walk into a wood in the summer and look up you can understand why. In nature there are so many different greens, it is of course the colour of photosynthesis, that magical spell that converts sunlight into chemical energy and gives us our oxygen. Interesting though I recently learnt that green is the only colour that is actually not used in the process of photosynthesis, which is why it is the one that is reflected out. A simple experiment that shows this is when tomatoe plants (or cress, I don’t think it makes much difference) are grown under different colours of light. They will be fine growing under only red light, only yellow or only blue, but under just green light they are not able to carry out photosynthesis, so die.

This explains that chlorophyll are green because they don’t use green light energy so green is reflected out. This is because chlorophyll arose in organisms in the ocean where halobacteria was already converting light energy to chemical energy using green wavelengths but not so much of red and blue wavelenghs, so chlorophyll was entrepreneurial and made use of the red and blue, reflecting out the green. Imagine if that had been the other way round, the world would look very different. Purple trees!

The modern English word for green comes from the same root as the Germanic words for grass and grow.

Symbolism

I am currently burning a green candle because green is the colour for Venus, the goddess of love and I could do with some care free love in my life right now.

In Europe and the U.S. green is the colour most associated with nature and growth, however is does have the negative symbolism of envy and illness. In America it is the colour of money, and it is the national colour of Ireland.

In Japan green is associated with eternal life, in China it is the symbol for health and happiness. Though in old Japanese, Chinese, Thai and Viennese green isn’t a separate colour but a shade of blue.

In North Africa it is the colour of corruption

In Islam it is the sacred colour representing respect and the prophet Mohammed, it was the colour of the banner of Mohammed and represents the lush green of paradise.
In Indonesia it is a forbidden colour.

Mixing Greens

For anyone who get curious about the colour green, mixing it is the ultimate way to get to know it. When painting greens for plants, ready made greens brought from a shop are rarely accurate to portray a green in nature. A ready made green can often look garish and false when applied directly to the paper. Even if one ready mixed one in the palette looks close I will try it with maybe a little alizarian, it’s complementary colour, to bring it down a touch and try this next to the subject. It amazes me what a difference just a spec of red can make.

Exercise mixing greens
Start by putting some lemon yellow in your palate. Using a soft flat brush put a sample of it in the top corner of a sheet of paper.
Clean your brush in water and take a very small amount of cobalt blue and add it to the lemon yellow. Put a sample of this next to the original yellow on your paper.
Repeat the last stage again adding a little bit more cobalt blue to the lemon yellow and add another sample alongside the previous two.
Continue this along the page with the greens getting increasingly bluish until the sample you have is almost completely blue. Label the sample Lemon yellow and cobalt blue

From yellow gradually adding more blue

Repeat this exercise all over again but instead of using cobalt blue use French Ultramarine. Remember to label the names of the colours next to the samples so you can use it for reference later. Do another sample strip u using Prussian blue. Now your sheet of paper should start to show the huge variety of greens it is possible to mix. Carry on the exercise doing a sample strip using all the different blues in your palate. Once you have done that choose one of those blues to keep the same and instead try all the different yellows you have, try cadmium yellow, yellow ochre, Indian yellow.

Make sure your water is clean and if not change it, you will get muddy unintended colours if using dirty water.

If painting natural objects you may find the greens you mix are a bit too bright. Improve this by adding the very tiniest drop of red to bring it down a touch, try Alizarin Crimson or Rose Madder. Be gentle though, you will be surprised at how the smallest amount can change the colour. Red is the complimentary colour to green, on the other side of the colour wheel, add too much to the mix and you’ll end up with a brown or grey. Though these can be used to good effect in shadows.

Even if you never intend to paint a picture, sitting and mixing greens is a very calming exercise. I recommend it on messy Thursdays.