The Alchemy of Colour

In Chroma. A Book of Color British filmmaker and artist Derek Jarman meditates on the colour grey. The title of the chapter ‘Grey Matter’ clearly points to one of the most common connotations of the colour grey: that is, its relation to thought and abstraction. However, Jarman departs from this classical reading and poetically evokes the immense phenomenological richness – one could almost say colourfulness – of grey. He sensitises the reader and lets them become aware of the intrinsic complexity of grey that according to Jarman can be luminous, shimmering, reflecting, transparent and opaque. It is significant that in his concise praise of grey, Jarman deliberately inverts St Augustine's Neoplatonic, metaphysical notion that light is the ‘Queen of Colours’ and even misquotes the Church father: ‘Shadow, writes Augustine, is the Queen of Colour. Colours sing in the grey.’ Grey, it seems, creates the resonant habitat for colours, and for Jarman its apparent absence of light – the Augustinian ‘absit’ that saddens the mind – does not necessarily possess only negative implications. During the course of the chapter Jarman beautifully elaborates on the remarkable presence of grey, and the numerous quotes and personal reflections show not only how many different emotions are ‘embodied’ in this colour, but how strongly grey is connected to memory, (in-) visibility and emptiness. ‘Despise not the ash, for it's the diadem of my heart, and the ash of things that endure. (Morienus, Rosarium).’

Chroma was written during the same period in which Jarman was working on his last, completely monochrome film Blue. Blue is Jarman's intense artistic confrontation with his diminishing eyesight due to AIDS – his vision was often altered by blue light – and consequentially his gradual entry into concrete, symbolic and ontological-existential darkness. The film thus represents a deep, philosophical cogitation on the subtle and sometimes unperceivable line between being and not-being, life and death – an aspect that is also touched upon in one of the last passages of the Grey-chapter in Chroma, when Jarman writes: ‘And we end in deadly grey.’ It was by the end of 1992 that Jarman returned to Blue as he had originally conceived it in the late 1980s.