Snow lines
A white cloud descends on the city
On a day when you wake up and it has been snowing, when you begin thinking about drawing, you tend to think of white and black. Drawing is at its most abstracted when made out of this basic opposition. When drawing, the ground is white and the white is usually made of paper. The marks that are put onto the ground are black or at least darker than the white ground, either made of ink or a dry substance such as charcoal. Rarely of course are actual drawings this easily categorised, the whites of various papers are never mid white, they are warm or cool, tinted towards yellow or green or blue. Blacks are rarely black, they are dark purples, browns or greys, but in some Platonic universe, drawings are always black marks on white paper. However when nature draws, it is often the opposite way round, white blanks out what lies underneath, it being the ground that is black or coloured and marks are made when that ground breaks through its white covering.
A line drawn in the snow by a dry stone wall
I have just read Han Kang's 'The White Book', a book that begins with a list:
Swaddling bands
Newborn gown
Salt
Snow
Ice
Moon
Rice
Waves
Yulan
White bird'Laughing whitely'
Blank paper
White dog
White hair
Shroud
Han Kang reminds us that white is not just a colour, it is at the same time an absence of colour, a carrier of particular physical meanings that are just as much embedded into the word, 'white', as the colour. I write these words lying in bed upon a white sheet. The sheet needs changing, and it reminds me of the last word on Kang's list, the winding sheet, the burial shroud that will at some point cover me. Not this actual sheet, but one of its cousins, one specially made for the purpose of shrouding the body. Kang begins her list with white swaddling bands. Swaddling clothes were used to wrap infants tightly, so that the movement of their limbs was restricted. It was believed that this made them feel safe and that it took away the trauma of their tiny bodies suddenly feeling that they were surrounded by an open expanse of emptiness. The wrapping was supposed to mimic the feeling that they would have experienced when held tightly in their mother's womb. I wonder if the winding sheet operates in a similar way, reminding our dead selves of where we came from and offering us a final comforting hug.
When we were children we would play 'ghosts', by wearing old sheets we could transform into spirits. We would cut slits where the eyes were and simply pull the sheet over us. Sometimes we would scare ourselves, what was play and pretence, for a moment became reality. That shift from one state to another is I believe central to the idea of animist thinking. Han Kang has a similar belief, but puts it so much more poetically. I'll set out in full page 77 of 'The White Book'.
Lace Curtain
Is it because of some billowing whiteness within us, unsullied, inviolate, that our encounters with objects so pristine never fail to leave us moved? Her passage through the frozen streets brings her to the building, where her gaze lifts to the first floor. To the flimsy lace curtain hanging there.
There are times when the crisp white of freshly laundered bed linen can seem to speak. When that pure-cotton fabric grazes her bare flesh, just there, it seems to tell her something. You are a noble person. Your sleep is clean, and the fact of your living is nothing to be ashamed of. Such is the strange comfort she receives, at that in-between time when sleep boarders wakefulness, when that crisp cotton bedsheet brushes her skin.
Han Kang finds something within us that chimes with the external world, in this case a 'billowing whiteness', one that I sometimes find in myself as I breathe in a new winter's day. The woman's conversation with the bed linen, echoing those conversations had thousands of years ago when we slept in caves, conversations with stones and old bones, animist thoughts that animated those stones and bones and gave them spiritual flesh and blood.
When we were children we would play 'ghosts', by wearing old sheets we could transform into spirits. We would cut slits where the eyes were and simply pull the sheet over us. Sometimes we would scare ourselves, what was play and pretence, for a moment became reality. That shift from one state to another is I believe central to the idea of animist thinking. Han Kang has a similar belief, but puts it so much more poetically. I'll set out in full page 77 of 'The White Book'.
Lace Curtain
Is it because of some billowing whiteness within us, unsullied, inviolate, that our encounters with objects so pristine never fail to leave us moved? Her passage through the frozen streets brings her to the building, where her gaze lifts to the first floor. To the flimsy lace curtain hanging there.
There are times when the crisp white of freshly laundered bed linen can seem to speak. When that pure-cotton fabric grazes her bare flesh, just there, it seems to tell her something. You are a noble person. Your sleep is clean, and the fact of your living is nothing to be ashamed of. Such is the strange comfort she receives, at that in-between time when sleep boarders wakefulness, when that crisp cotton bedsheet brushes her skin.
Han Kang finds something within us that chimes with the external world, in this case a 'billowing whiteness', one that I sometimes find in myself as I breathe in a new winter's day. The woman's conversation with the bed linen, echoing those conversations had thousands of years ago when we slept in caves, conversations with stones and old bones, animist thoughts that animated those stones and bones and gave them spiritual flesh and blood.
I'm staring up at fast moving clouds, a mass of fleeing creatures, passing through before the storm that we all know is coming. Like the boy I once was I still see cloud creatures and landscapes unfolding and becoming and dissolving, a constant metamorphosis of one image after another, nature's Ovid, written by the wind and water droplets.
The sun has just broken through and dazzled my eyes, so that I cant look any more, a dark shadow replacing the bright flash of white. Every white, in order to be seen as white, needs a dark companion to measure itself against.
White and black are constantly swapping over in our perceptions. Rods set into our retinas are primarily responsible for vision in low-light conditions and are highly sensitive to light but do not discern colour. They easily become over stimulated and in effect get tired and so we see afterimages, whereby black becomes white and white becomes black, as the rods recharge themselves. Stare for a while at this negative face below.
When viewing focus on the crosshair in the middle for about one minute. After this, close your eyes. Briefly, an afterimage will appear. Subsequent blinking may bring it back, as it becomes less and less distinct. The larger you can make the image before staring at it the better.
We also see the Colour White when all the cones at the back of the eyes are stimulated equally; when they are, the brain perceives white. We also perceive white when our rods are stimulated during low light conditions. Unlike cones, rods are able to detect light at a much lower level. This is why we see only black and white in dimly lit rooms. It is rare to see in a more mono-chromatic scale during the day, but there are times in winter when it snows, when it can feel as if the world has been reduced to white and black.
When it snows it is as if a giant eraser is applied to the world. A whiteout being a dense blizzard especially in polar regions, however whiteout is also a white correction fluid for covering typing or writing mistakes. The two homographs (words that are spelt the same but which mean different things) are very closely related, snow, like whiteout fluid, does in effect erase everything that it covers.
Paintings can be homographs too. White on White (1918) is an abstract oil-on-canvas painting by Kazimir Malevich. It is an example of a painting produced by Malevich when he was a member of the Russian Suprematism movement. His white on white reflects his interest in spirituality.
Kazimir Malevich: White on White
Mark Tansey: White on White
White on White, 1986 is a painting by Mark Tansey, whereby Eskimos meet Bedouins in a snow/sandstorm. His white on white reflects his interest in visual paradoxes.
Piero Manzoni, Achrome1958
Manzoni wanted his white paintings or 'Achromes' to be valued for what they were as physical things, not what they might represent.
Pure white monochrome far from limiting artists, often opens up a rich and versatile area of investigation. As well as offering an arena for emotive and philosophical statements, it draws attention to techniques, materials, textures, surfaces and structures. It also emphasises the surface's responsiveness to light and shadow. White can suggest contemplation, emptiness, the void or infinite space. It can induce calm or terror, it offers itself up to the observer in such a way that it draws us in and at the same time draws us out.
Robert Rauschenberg 1951 White Painting
Robert Rauschenberg 1951 White Painting
Robert Rauschenberg's 'White Paintings' were a series of modular canvases, made with five variations: one-, two-, three-, four-, and seven-panels. They were intended to have pristine, smooth surfaces unmarred by handling, and some of them were hung as set décor for John Cage’s Theatre Piece No. 1. Cage said that the paintings were the inspiration for his signature “silent” composition 4'33" (1952). Rauschenberg's white canvases reflect his interest in creating a situation that allows people to closely observe the play of light and shadow.
When snow falls, it is often the accompanying silence that impresses us most.
In the home, the most often encountered white images are those woven into the forms of the net curtain.
We can never be sure of what we are seeing behind the net curtain and because of this for me they are a domestic version of the shadows on the wall of Plato's Cave. If he had been brought up and spent his early years in a council house in Dudley, and spent a lot of time at his grandmother's in Pensnett he would have often looked out of windows shrouded in net curtains, curtains designed to let light in, but to prevent anyone seeing what was going on inside. They could have given Plato an alternative metaphor, one that had the added value of a feeling tone wrapped around a particular idea of a working class home and 'domesticity'.
Cupid: Net curtain
For myself net curtain images have even more meaning than white on white artworks. They evoke submerged domestic worlds, half seen images, fragmented glimpses of what is going on behind them.
A something half seen behind the net
We can never be sure of what we are seeing behind the net curtain and because of this for me they are a domestic version of the shadows on the wall of Plato's Cave. If he had been brought up and spent his early years in a council house in Dudley, and spent a lot of time at his grandmother's in Pensnett he would have often looked out of windows shrouded in net curtains, curtains designed to let light in, but to prevent anyone seeing what was going on inside. They could have given Plato an alternative metaphor, one that had the added value of a feeling tone wrapped around a particular idea of a working class home and 'domesticity'.
In my mind's eye I see that flimsy lace curtain seen by Han Kang's protagonist, as a net curtain, one that I remember seeing many years ago, that was woven with white images of the cosmos; planets, comets, moons and stars, caught within a gigantic net, just as cupid is captured in the net curtain above.
A net curtain drifts in front of my view like falling snow, I see the world through it, glimpses of possibilities, vision whited out but never completely and like the monster never actually seen, the world becomes more frightening in its possibility, than it ever could in reality.
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