Dusk

A Colour at the Edge of Change

I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.

William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury

I noticed today the colour of the year for 2025 is Future Dusk. It was announced by something called Coloro, which bills itself as the global authority on the future of color. This seems to be a competitor colour consortium to the better known Pantone colour of the year ( it was peach fuzz this year and next year’s is not yet announced). I have to say I kind of like the name Future Dusk and I kind of like the colour too and I thought I would write you about the dusky colours which when I think about it are not really colours at all but a kind of blackening or draining of the light out the colours.

Whats called astronomical dusk is the moment just between twilight and full on night when the sun is eighteen degrees below the horizon and the sky is still with the barest last of the light before night sets in. Poetically dusk is when things go grainy a softening and blurring of colours a cooling of a summer day into evening and the flicker of kids returning home from a day catching crayfish and building forts and dandilion crowns and the sounds of the call of supper from every house across the neighbourhood the sun almost down now the kitchen light orange. A blue deepening. A far awayness. A between the worlds colour. Rothko got it in the mid 1960s when he put hazy greys and dirty plum colours over a blue black to make the colours that were barely colours more like feelings reaching. A sinking feeling. But no that is not what dusk is. Dusk is quicker than that. Its indescribable by light or pigment or poem it is not a long thing like evening or twilight instead it is a dividing line between night and day and it eludes observation. Its a turning point that you only know after its turned.

I once took a ballet course for a month or so with a good friend and the thing I remember especially was learning to do a single pirouette or full 360 degree turn the trick was to end up exactly where you started. One of the students asked how you know where you are in the turn so that you end up in just the right place and our teacher who had a strong french accent and took great pains to show the class exactly how every tiny move works and how to stand and angle you body and point your toes and line up your spine with your neck and the top of your head, that teacher who knew every detail of ballet kind of took a pause after that question. Then he said: its strange but at a certain point in the pirouette you kind of lose all consciousness its like you black out and you just can not know where exactly your body is but he said you have to just trust that you will end up where you started. There was magic in that answer. The magic of the unknowable within the exact. His answer was kind of dusky. The eclipse last week had a bit of that same quality for me.

On the day of the eclipse Winter and I were way up on the third floor roof with a clear view of the whole sky above the city, a dented metal bowl of caramel corn I’d made still warm and two pairs of cardboard safety glasses. But sky was a blank above us. The afternoon covered over with cloud like thick greek yogurt with ashes stirred in. Nothing was moving. There was nothing to see up there where the eclipse was supposed to be happening. After a quarter of an hour looking out over the rooftops and watching two sea gulls and an airplane who maybe had a better view we got cold and the sky was unchanging and we climbed back down went inside and gave up on this once in a lifetime event which you could probably watch on the internet from somewhere more dramatic along the line of totality. Little Rock? Toledo? Montreal?

I was about Winters age when I saw the last eclipse with my family we were in a grassy lumpy field on the side of the road to the little green lake where the abandoned mica mines were and I used to float my duck decoy that I loved. I’m pretty sure we had little chips of thick dark plastic to look through and we had the day off from school and we were much warned about going blind but it was that same kind of grey day. The sky a blank. And one or the other of us kids kept saying I think I see something but I’m not sure that I ever did see the eclipse. I remember the white-grey sky though, the anticipation, the feeling that the important thing was just out of reach behind some blurry screen kind of like watching for shooting stars and you turn you head just as someone sees it with at gasp and points but by the time you looks its already disappeared.

Back in the present it did start getting a bit darker outside. A kind of hush as the theatre lights go dim. Expectations where kind of low at this point but we went out into the street and in the east the sky was dark blue and the streetlights came on slowly and more neighbours started coming out of their houses and it was like someone was slowly turning the lights down almost like it was us that were slowly losing light like we were slowly losing consciousness as some drug took effect. The blue sky turned an richer royal blue for a moment or two and then, suddenly? slowly? almost in an out of time way, the clouds made a little silent shift or slide and some diaphanous layer opened like an aperture and there it was. A fine fingernail of white glowing fire at the edge of a black hole. You could look right at it because there was still a layer of cloud over that tiny window. Gossamer intimate window of moment showing us something personal some working of the heavens. It was not there and then it was there and we all were under its spell and then it was not there again and someone slowly turned the lights of the world back on and the sky went back to being that heavy clouded grey and everything was exactly the same.

On these longer slower evenings I think about the draining of the light. I think about Dusk. What colour it that I wonder? Something futuristic in the dead center between blue and purple? A dusty darkened indigo? Chips of azurite in mud. A purple layered over top of a orangey clay colour? a gentle bruise colour that Katie talked about? The colour of the absolute center of the pirouette? Or is it like an eclipse part expectation, part memory part hidden, part ancient and part some harbinger of what’s to come.

For members of The Colour Lab I have a kind of dusky moodboard to inspire you below: I hope you will consider joining us…

Bas Jan Ader Double sided postcard / announcement published in conjunction with show held November 9 - December 8, 1974.

Also welcoming your thoughts on Ballet, The Colour of The Year, Eclipses, Dusky toners or whatever else is on your minds dear readers.

—jason