# Colour-Music: The Art of Mobile Color/Chapter 11

CHAPTER XI
MOBILE COLOUR AND THE ARTIST
TURNING from musicians to painters, colour-music, of course, makes a much more direct appeal to the latter. To them the two specially new qualities in regard to this presentment of colour are, its separation from form and the introduction of time and rhythm. At first the absence of form makes the full appreciation of the colour some-what difficult to them, every artist being trained to regard colour as occupying more or less definite spaces and shapes. But, on the other hand, the extremely subtle changes and interweavings of colour, the new methods of producing texture and quality, the rapid contrasts, the interesting changes of harmony, and the joy of being able to produce and study colour with the ease afforded by the colour-organ, makes them at once appreciative ​of the new art and more open to see its present and future possibilities than the musicians. Sir Hubert von Herkomer's remarks as to mobile colour will have been read with interest as bearing upon this point—all the more so, perhaps, from the fact that he is an able musical composer as well as a great painter.
An artist thinks little of undertaking a long and tedious journey in order to be able to watch and study the magnificent colour harmonies of southern seas; the brilliant effects of sunlight upon the white buildings and costumes of Tunis or Tangier; or to give himself the opportunity of making a few rapid transcriptions of sunsets only to be seen in the sierras of Spain or the deserts of Egypt. When, therefore, he is provided with an instrument by means of which he can study and analyse somewhat similar effects of colour at a moment's notice, he feels that a new power is placed within his grasp and appreciates its acquisition. It is first the technical qualities of colour that will most appeal to him. He is principally interested in the impressions produced by the ​interweaving of opposing colours and the resultant effects of luminosity and other beautiful qualities, and also by the æsthetic emotions produced by contrasts into which the element of time enters. Just as in a picture a contrast is largely influenced by the relative size of contrasting colour patches, or, in other words, by the relative masses of colour, so in mobile colour contrast is greatly modified in its effects on the eye and mind by the length of time during which the contrasting colours remain upon the screen. If, for instance, it is flooded with a deep red for a second or two, and a short sharp note of sapphire-blue is then struck, the contrast will be greater than that produced by two brief notes of scarlet and blue of equal duration. A whole series of rapid notes of colour of equal length which are more or less in contrast to each other affect the colour-senses less strongly than the same colours in contrast with others when of longer duration upon the screen.
Of special interest also to artists is the introduction of the element of time into gradated effects of colour by means of mobile ​colour instruments. In a picture or in a decorative design, gradation—that is to say, the gradual increase of the strength of colour over a given area—often occurs. In the works of the great landscape painters—such, for instance, as Turner, where the problems of atmosphere and space have interested him so greatly—gradation of colour is present almost everywhere. But it is, as it were, fixed gradation; it may begin slowly and may rapidly increase in depth and intensity over a given space until it culminates in a strong point or focus. Its rate of change may also be quite equal and steady with no rapid increase and no rapid decrease, but in both cases, once stated, it is fixed and definite, whereas when colour is produced by the colour-organ under conditions of gradation, whether it be towards intensification or of weakening of the colour, it grows, or wanes, under the eye of the spectator and can be quickened, or retarded, at the will of the executant. Gradation of colour under such conditions becomes much more interesting.
Keyboard of a colour-organ.
Many artists wisely keep objects of beautiful colour in their studios in order to be able to bring their minds into tune with the beauty of colour in nature or art. Some choose Oriental china, others Limoges enamel, others the plumage of birds or collections of gems and minerals, others, again, mediæval and oriental draperies or stained glass. But the artist who has access to a mobile colour ​instrument—which it is to be hoped will some day take such a simplified form that it will be within the reach of everyone—can at any time sit down and obtain thousands of suggestions, almost at haphazard.
This is one of the uses of the colour-organ for the artist. But what is of more importance to us for the moment is the emotional effect of mobile colour. Less sensitive as a rule than the musician to rhythm and all the complexities of time and counter-point, he is, by his training, much more open to receive emotional influences from the colour itself. It is, however, interesting to note that owing, as a rule, to this training, or perhaps to the very constitution of his mind and feeling, he will have an instinctive preference for certain schemes and combinations of colour rather than others. As the music of colour floods the screen, his preference for certain arrangements, or symphonies of colour, will be very marked, and it is curious to note the great divergencies of opinion amongst artists with regard to the preferability of some arrangements over others. The pleasure or ​pain produced by colour are much more pronounced, in most cases, with the artist than with the ordinary spectator, and it is therefore to the artist that the new art must look in the future, as it has up to the present time, for the greatest assistance in its development. Experience has shown that once having overcome the disconcerting realization of the fact that colour does not require form to make it beautiful or interesting; the eye of the artist becomes rapidly educated to appreciate the subtleties of colour-music.
A point that strikes most artists is that already alluded to, that however many colours are mixed upon the screen, there is no tendency towards deadness or impurity of colour as in the case of pigments. The greater the number of colours projected upon the screen, the greater the tendency towards white light; whereas in pigments, the greater the number of colours mixed upon the canvas, the greater the tendency towards blackness.
Vast numbers of combinations appear in colour-music which are seldom or never seen in art and very rarely in nature, and these are ​specially worthy of the painter's attention. One practical difficulty is that the colour appears in a darkened room, and can therefore only be compared with other tints produced in a similar way, and not with local colour of objects placed near the screen. But a special arrangement for comparison of the local colour of particular objects can be made by throwing detached beams of white light from an arc-lamp upon them. The two narrow bands or strips of pure white light usually projected upon the screen at each side of the colour-field also give a standard of comparison between the colours upon it and absolute white, and enable the depth and intensity of low tones to be better appreciated. If no such bands of light are used, low-toned colours, by reason of their being surrounded by darkness, are apt to appear too luminous, and their full strength cannot be realized. Somewhat the same conditions exist in stained glass windows in a dark church, and it was probably in order to enable the beauty of the sombre colours which the great stained glass designers of the Middle Ages often used that they frequently sur​rounded their pictorial designs by fields of white or grey glass. This is very marked in the windows at Fairford, and in much German glass, and the principle has been adopted by a whole school of modern English glass painters in imitation of them.
Another very important effect of the white bands is to prevent, as has already been said, the colour changes from becoming too dazzling to the eye and too violent in their effect. Their width is an important point and has to be found experimentally. If they are too wide, the brilliancy of the paler tints is injured; if, on the other hand, they are too narrow, the depth of the darker ones is not fully appreciated.
The use of the colour-organ in training the memory for colours may become important to young artists, many of whom neglect this training and regret it later in their careers. There are many people who have a keen musical faculty in other respects, but have no musical memory, and so there are many excellent artists who have a very feeble memory for colour, largely, perhaps, because they have not` ​cultivated it systematically. Endless exercises in memory training for colour are possible with the colour-organ, and many interesting experiments in this direction have been made.