Special Christmas Edition

A forbidden colour between red and green

I thought I would write something about the true meaning of Christmas colours maybe starting with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and its pre-Christian roots in Druid sun worship with the Holly King battling the Oak King on the winter solstice, but getting to the bottom of the meaning of colours, especially for some belief system of the past, seems to be an impossible mission. The internet is a pretty bad historian, and facts on colour symbology get mixed up really fast: green is envy, sickness, mold, and death, while at the same time it is hope and the new life of spring. Red is death and love and passion and the holy robes of priests and blood and bunch of other things, and even if the colours of red and green did have some singular meaning for some select group of people in the past, I couldn’t find anything reliable that went deeper than German Christmas trees and the illustrator that invented Santa Claus for CocaCola and a brief rabbit hole about Logan tartans. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt like it wasn’t the separate colours of green and red that I was interested in, but the combination of the two.

There’s a suggestive either/or to this combination. Stop or Go. Decline or Accept. And when you put these opposites together, you get a strange woozy kind of feeling like eating too many mini-candycanes off of the tree as a kid. Van Gogh, who was very interested in using opposites on the colour wheel to make paintings come alive by messing with your mind, was a fan of what red and green can do together. He used the kind of seasick effect of the combination in several portraits and most famously in his 1888 painting, The Night Cafe. “I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime,” he said in a letter to his brother, Theo. In a second letter next day, Vincent goes into further detail. “I sought to express with red and green the terrible human passions. The hall is blood-red and pale yellow, with a green billiard table in the centre, and four lamps of lemon yellow, with rays of orange and green. Everywhere it is a battle and antithesis of the most different reds and greens.”

The impressionists starting with Monet had been playing with the optical effects of side-by-side complementary colours since the early 1870s, but Vincent almost seemed to be creating new colours in the mind with his weird juxtapositions. It might be the unwillingness of red and green to combine, or the inability of the eye to find a middle ground between the two that gives them their particular power. But what if there was a colour called RedGreen? Not the brownish colour you get when you mix the two together in paints, but some new colour somehow outside the gamut of what we call real colours. Hewitt D. Crane and Thomas P. Piantanida thought there might be. In 1983 they set up an experiment using an eye tracker, mirrors, and red and green stripes that allowed the two colours to combine in the mind. Where the red and green met or overlapped in the experiment subjects claimed to be experiencing a totally new colour:

“Some observers indicated that although they were aware that what they were viewing was a color (that is, the field was not achromatic), they were unable to name or describe the color. One of these observers was an artist with large color vocabulary. Other observers of the novel hues described the first stimulus as a reddish-green. Some of the volunteers for the experiment reported that afterward, they could still imagine the new colors for a period of time.”

These colours are called “Impossible” or even more deliciously, “Forbidden” Colours, and there is a test to try below which doesn’t work for everyone (cross your eyes until the two pluses completely overlap to discover the forbidden reddish-green).

I’m not sure that the test created a whole new colour for me but I love this idea of forbidden colours— a set of hues out beyond anything found in a rainbow or artist’s pallet or computer screen. And I get it. As an inkmaker, I think of buckthorn berries as producers of impossible colour. They stain a sidewalk grey, their juice is purple and when you add lye to them they start to turn a golden colour called sap green that once acted as a replacement for gold among budget-conscious medieval illuminators. Buckthorn colour is a moving colour, a kind of experienced colour dependant not just on its composition but also on its conditions and it is not describable in a singular, stable way. As Ellen Meloy says in The Anthropology of Turquoise:

“Colors are not possessions; they are the intimate revelations of an energy field… light waves with mathematically precise lengths… deep, resonant mysteries with boundless subjectivity… Our lives, when we pay attention to light, compel us to empathy with color.”

I am writing to you on the eve of the ultimate holiday of Christian-capitalist dualisms: of naughty vs nice of getting vs giving of sin vs redemption. And I’m looking for a way out. Amidst the mania of the season, I find in Meloy’s appreciation of boundless subjective colour another way to think about Christmas. Maybe it’s the seemingly impossible contradictions of red and green that allow them to transcend themselves, and open up a little sliver of light.

Blinky Palermo, Ohne Titel, 1974

Happy holidays. Please do to spread the word

Or join the conversations.