Supporting Material Vol 1 - Colourful Language

Key Text
Chromaphobia – Key Quotes
p. 10
‘There is a kind of white that is more than white, and
this was that kind of white. There is a kind of white that
repels everything that is inferior to it, and that is almost
everything. This was that kind of white. There is a kind
of white that is not created by bleach but that itself
is bleach. This was that kind of white. This white was
aggressively white. It did its work on everything around
it, and nothing escaped.’
p. 12
‘What is it that motivated this fixation with white?’
p. 52
‘If colour is cosmetic, it is added to the surface of things,
and probably at the last moment. It does not have
a place within things; it is an after thought; it can be
rubbed off.’
Colour, then, is arbitrary and unreal: mere make-up. But
while it may be superficial, that is not quite the same as
being trivial, for cosmetic colour is also always less than
honest.’
‘There is an ambiguity in make-up; cosmetics can often
confuse, cast doubt, mask or manipulate; they can
produce illusions or deceptions.’
p. 62
‘In at least one sense, all painting is cosmetic. All
painting involves the smearing of coloured paste over
a flat, bland surface, and is done in order to trick and
deceive a viewer.’
‘In one sense, all painting is cosmetic, but in another
sense the use of flat screen-printed and industrial
colours will always appear cosmetic – applied, stuck on,
removable – in a way that the modulated colours and
tone of oil paint do not.’
p. 79
‘To attend to colour, then, is, in part, to attend to the
limits of language, what a world without language might
be like’
‘Many commentators have taken the image of childhood
as a model, if not for a language-free universe then
at least for a world in which language has not yet fully
established its grip on experience; this world is, also,
more often than not, saturated in colour.’
‘Stories of adulthood tend more often to lament a world
of colour eclipsed by the shadow of language; they
present images of luminous childood becoming clouded
by the habits of adult life.’
‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning: ‘Frequent tears have run the
colours from my life.’
p. 80
‘If in many of these stories the exposure to language
robs a life of its colour, are there then other stories in
which it happens the other way around? Are there equal
and opposite stories in which exposure to colour robs
a life of its language, stories in which a sudden flood of
colour renders a speaker speechless’
p. 81
‘The idea that colour is beyond, beneath or in some
other way at the limit of language has been expressed in
a number of ways by a number of writers’
Colour and Culture by John Gage
‘the feeling that verbal language is incapable of defining
the experience of colour’
‘In Colour Codes, Charles A. Riley notes that “ colour
refuses to conform to schematic and verbal systems’