Watercolour – Glacial Sunset

When asked what my favourite colour is I find it almost impossible to answer, why would anyone choose one colour anyway?  But if you dangled me over a cliff and laid my life on a choice I’d have to say purple.

Out of the 3 primary colours i.e. red, blue and yellow the latter is my least favourite only because as clothing it makes me look a rather unattractive shade of jaundice.  I love red, especially cherry reds which lean more towards blue in the colour wheel.  I also love blues especially the more purple ones which of course lean more towards red on the colour wheel.  So when I say purple is my favourite colour it’s really because I couldn’t choose between red and blue.

The English word purple owes its origins originally to the Greek word porphura (referring variously to purple mussel, the colour and cloth dyed with it) which in turn became purpura in Latin and purpul in Old English.  The first recorded use of the word ‘purple’ was in AD975.

Porphura referring to a purple mussel is a bit of a misnomer because this colour dye (called Tyrian purple, from the city Tyre in the south governorate of Lebanon) was extracted from a predatory marine snail, the spiny dye-murex snail.  This poor hapless creature yields a secretion used to produce a natural dye which unusually became brighter with weathering and sunlight.  Extraction of the secretion was labour intensive involving either sustainable prodding the animal which would produce it as defense mechanism or dispensing with such niceties completely and crushing them.  Consequently the dye was expensive with purple dyed textiles used as status symbols indicated by other names such as royal and imperial purple.

The oldest pigments used to obtain the colour purple were haematite and manganese.  The first modern synthetic purple was discovered in 1856 by William Henry Perkin who at the time was trying to synthesize quinine.  In my colour palette I use Winsor Violet (PV 23) as well as mixing many beautiful purples from various combinations of the colours Winsor Blue Red Shade (PB15) and Quinacridone Magenta (PR122).

Did you know there is such a thing as the ‘Purple Earth hypothesis’?  If early Archaea (single-celled organisms) used retinal (a purple pigment) instead of the predominantly green chlorophyll of today to extract energy from the sun, large areas of the ocean and shoreline would have been coloured purple – I kind of like that idea!

This post has now begun to run away with me, little did I know how much information on purple I would uncover when I started – I could write a book, but not right now.  Just a few more facts to cement why purple is my favourite colour.

This useless fact is dedicated to John and Anna – Klingons have purple blood.

The compliment of purple is yellow which means when you use the two colours adjacent they make each look brighter, more intense and visually pleasing.  To get an idea of what I mean have a look at my painting ‘Glacial Sunset’ at the top of this post.

Distant mountains like those in ‘Glacial Sunset’ can look particularly purple at sunrise or sunset because of a phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering.  The science is a little dry so I will try to keep it short and sweet.  Sunlit sky (our atmosphere) is blue because it scatters more short-wavelength light which is at the blue end of the visible light spectrum.  Distant mountains look bluish because the distance means we see less contrast between them and the blue sky.  At sunrise and sunset the sun is at a lower angle in the sky so that its light travels a greater distance through a larger volume of atmosphere.  Under these conditions more blue and green light are scattered away, leaving more red light to reach our eyes.  The combination of distant bluish mountains and red atmospheric light make those mountains appear purple just as if you were to mix red and blue pigments.

Lastly I have to say that I much prefer the Eastern to the Western symbolism surrounding the colour purple, the latter associating the colour with among others piety, faith, penitence, theology, vanity, extravagance.  For Eastern civilizations purple symbolizes spiritual awareness, physical and mental healing, strength and abundance.  Perhaps more serendipitous for me – in Chinese painting purple symbolizes harmony in the universe because it is a combination of blue (associated with yin) and red (associated with yang)!