“White ... is not a mere absence of colour; it is

a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red,

as definite as black ... God paints in many

colours; but He never paints so gorgeously,

I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints

in white.” G. K. Chesterton, 1874 –1936.

How do you talk about white when it is not even

a proper colour? If you mix all the rainbow

wavelengths of coloured light, you get white

light, but to get white as a surface colour, you

have to take everything else away. It is what’s

left when all other colours are gone: an empty,

achromatic, hue-less blank. White is at once

everything and it is nothing; it is all colours and

no colour at all; it is sound and light, heat and

cold, happy and sad, good and bad; sugar and

milk, speed and cocaine; the colour of god,

virgins, death and everlasting life. As a term it

is filled with so much ambiguous paradox that

it even puts its partner opposite, black, in the

shade.

White has immense power over us. It has a

direct effect on how we perceive objects and

environments. “White”, said the painter Wassily

Kandinsky, “acts like a deep and absolute

silence full of possibilities”**. Imagine going

to bed on a cold dark winter’s evening and

throwing open the curtains next morning to be

greeted by a world transformed by snow. All

differences covered, all edges softened and

rounded, all sound muffled, all ugliness and dirt

made pristine, pure and beautiful. What heart

does not thrill with childish excitement at

nature’s most impressive of magic shows? Snow

is an old and special thing, it is the oldest white

we know, and still we find it enchanting. Perhaps

all of our feelings and responses to white stem

from our experience of snow. It is both purity

and the void; made precious by its temporary

and fragile delicacy. When the sun shines, snow

WHITE

everything and nothing

by Sophie Lovell

is blinding – blinding white light – we are in awe

of white, it is godlike because we cannot even

look at it.

We like to think of white as our blank canvas,

our empty stage: pure, neutral nothingness. A

freshly renovated apartment, white and empty,

waiting for new owners to clutter it with charac-

ter and belongings. A table laid with empty

white plates waiting to be filled with food. The

blank pages of a notebook waiting to be filled

with words and sketches. White is supposed to

represent transitional space, space waiting for

content. 20th century art, for example, is almost

synonymous with the evenly lit, white ideal

spaces that it is presented in. Think of a typical

contemporary art gallery and, like as not, you

will envisage white cubes of space filled with

“art”. It is a strong image and a common one,

but the strength of this image doesn’t come

from the art, it comes from the supposedly

neutral container – it is the space we notice

first, not the content. The white, ideal space re-

presents, in the words of art critic and artist

Brian O’Doherty, “more than any single picture

... the archetypal image of 20th century art”***.

We have experienced so many scenes set in the

easy neutrality of white space that we have

come to feel at home in it for its own sake.

Somewhere along our Modernist journey, maybe

it was as we idled a little in the soothing lines of

Minimalism, white stopped being a temporary

vacancy and became a means unto itself. It

brought areas of calm into our visual overdose

culture. In graphic design, white space is a vital

device that helps a reader to focus upon the

graphics and understand text. The better the

balance between this negative, white space and

its opposite, content, the better the impact of

the graphics and the greater the sense of depth

and quality of artistic expression. There also is a

degree of reverence here created by the juxtapo-

sition of object with symbolic nothingness. Like

the white gallery containing perhaps just one or

two pieces of art, it induces a sense of sharpened

focus by design, not dissimilar to a simple white

chapel with a single devotional object – or single

tree in a rural landscape carpeted in snow.

A pioneering use of the power of white space is

the Beatles’ eponymous 1968 “White Album”,

designed by the artist Richard Hamilton. It was

recorded after the band’s return from a trans-

cendental trip to India and as a follow up to

the multilayered baroque extravagance of Sgt.

Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The White

Album had no proper title or external cover art

at all, apart from the words: “The Beatles”

embossed in plain type on the front and an issue

number. This absence of conventional graphics,

a package divested of almost all ornament and

colour, was absolutely revolutionary. What this

white space promised was content so special that

it required elevating and setting apart from every

record that had gone before. Thus the “empty”

white cover as good as guaranteed cult status.

Frankly, if John, Paul, George and Ringo had

filled it with a collection of shipping forecasts

instead of pop songs, it probably wouldn’t have

made much difference to the fact that it became

one of the biggest selling albums of all time. On

the other hand, to be fair, if it hadn’t been made

by a band as popular as The Beatles it might

have been a bit too revolutionary for the general

public to handle.

Apart from offering a conceptual canvas, white

has other roles in our culture. We all know what

white wedding dresses are supposed to symbol-

ise, and doctors don’t just wear white clothes

because they show up the dirt (and their under-

wear) better. White stands for purity and clean-

liness. We wear it to show our sophistication

and civilisation, to show how we have moved

above and beyond the grubby greens and browns

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11-0602 Snowblind

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