Primary Source

West Leicester, April 2018

I went out to photograph white vans, the other day, and ended up with this primary-coloured gem, as well (actually, the white vans are there too - in the background).  It doesn't really relate to anything specific in my current work, but is just the kind of thing that purely delights my eye without any other agenda.  It does, I suppose, fit into my recurrent category of 'Yellow Things', although the conjunction of all three primary colours actually feels more significant here.

Actually, I'd been waiting for ages to capture this particular subject.  I pass it regularly, but it's nearly always obscured by the frenetic human activity of one of those busy hand car-wash spots that proliferate in every city.  My chance finally arrived when everyone knocked-off, briefly, for an Easter breather - just as the sun came out.

Given that juxtaposing the three primaries will always tend towards a certain stridency - it feels like my subject has arrived at a perfect proportional balance of yellow-blue-red through entropy alone.  Thinking about that made me reflect on how hard it can be to pull off this kind of thing deliberately in a painting.  What better excuse then, to have another look at one of my all time favourite paintings, 'Molen Mill In Sunlight', by Piet Mondrian?

Piet Mondrian, 'Molen Mill In Sunlight', Oil on Canvas, 1908

I consider Mondrian one of the great colourists in western art - and he would, of course, go on to make a habit of expertly balancing the three primaries in his later Neo-Plasticist paintings.  To achieve it within a coherent representational image, as he did here, feels even more impressive in many ways.  He managed to create a painting which is elegiac (almost hallucinogenically so) and yet also deeply meditative - using what might so easily have been the bluntest of tools.  Closer inspection reveals the importance of those lesser injections of greenish and violet and orange secondaries.  They seem to play a similar modulating role to that of the neutrally-coloured areas of erosion and grime in my own photographs.