True Colours

Having lived in Dublin my entire life I have always considered it to be a predominantly grey place. In my minds eye I can see grey oppressive skies full of grey puddles in waiting. I can see grey, imperial georgian buildings and grey, squat, soviet-esque office buildings from the 1960’s. The land of grey summers and more intensely grey winters.

Contrary to this I always considered the countryside to be a place of neon-vibrant, lushous greens, of blue seas, of black and white cows and, of course, a place of red tractors. The post card image, as the mother of a friend of mine put it: the colours of ‘paddy-whackery’ colours with shades that have all the subtlety of our tricoloured flag.

To my grave embarrassment, I know very little about Art and less still about Irish Art so I am by no means an authority but my impression of Irish decorative art, at least, the type I see in the hallways of my apartment building or that you might expect to see in the room at your B&B is that it reflects this. Bright red boats with fishermen folding nets on yellow sand and the green hills rolling ad infinitum into the crayola blue skies. Although my knowledge of painting is limited I do know a little of Irish cinema and anything I have encountered as of this time has either reflected my idea of a grey city and of the post card painted countryside.

That said, on a recent trip to Wexford, looking out on the seascape to my left and the land to my right I was shaken to attention by the hue of the sea and colours in the landscape I had never associated with Ireland before. The sea was full of what seemed wise stoney blue shimmers, the rocks between Greystones and Wicklow were hard carbon grey and jagged like monstrous unpolished crystals. In the country side the deep umber oranges in rusted railings and the wet, mossy greens in the grass seemed much richer than I had previously imagined. The aspect of the place seemed to bely a maturity and a wealth of epic, sage emotion. It seemed as though beneath or withstanding the ‘paddy-whackery’ existed a real place which exists through the ages and into time immemorial.

The experience here brought back to me many of the poems I had learned verbatim in school which now reside in my mind only as the whisps of sentiments they left with me. I now sensed what Seamus Heaney meant when he spoke of the bogs and how they connected us with our ancestry. I knew why the ‘Tollund Man’ had affected him so intimately and why the ‘Bogland’ was such a powerful place and made such a perfect metaphor.

These sentiments struck me again when I visited the Office of Public Works on St. Stephen’s Green on a whim. In the entrance foyer there are sheets of stone set into the walls from different areas of the country. Each has its own striking and unique texture, make up and colour. Some are ebony black punctuated by the primordial white shells fossilized within them which give them the quality of a clear night sky. One particular example from Connemara has shades of greens which gives it the aspect of being almost liquid and the impression that if you reached your arm out to touch it you could quite easily plunge straight into it.

It seemed a subject which was so ripe for exploration in a modern context against our New Ireland that I was at a loss as to why no one, as far as I knew, had broached it. This is the very reason why I was so stunned and moved when Leonard Abraham and Mark O’Halloran’s new film ‘Garage’ was released shortly after this. Mark O’Halloran’s powerful script viscerally captures a man, ‘Josie’, living in the abyssal margin of society, politely shuffled aside and left alone. This poignant portrayal is only strengthened further by Leonard Abraham’s keen investigation and apt depiction of the true colour scheme of Josie’s surroundings.

Just like the colours I had experienced, Abraham had astutely rendered them on screen, although he used more muted tones than I had invisaged which better suited the drama of the story. This was coupled with an ingenious art direction which held all the shots together by creating a composition of tones and shades of similar colours throughout. At Josie’s garage we saw the rusted reddy-browns in the paint work, in the signage and in the pipes. While he walked we saw the sombre greens in the trees and fields. Throughout the film water is a hugely important element and here we saw gun metal blue stillness of the lake and the darkness and forboding infinity of the deep waters against the blue-grey sky. This truly evocative and well crafted use of the colours at the locations fascinated me and with this in mind and feeling as though I had for the first time really seen the landscape or at least really reacted to it I felt compelled to make a similar effort to reassess how I had seen Dublin up until this point.

I took it upon myself to walk home from the city center and to search for some interesting and telling colours of an urban Ireland beyond the grey-scale or the vibrant colours of foreign franchises. I wanted to see colours which would tell me something about both the modern city and hopefully something which would link it with its history. I was hoping to discover colours or compositions of colour which would speak of Dublin and not merely of urban.

Strolling around, presumably looking like a mad man I must admit, inspecting the buildings I had considered all to be grey, I was stricken by the shades of colour in the brick work. The stone work in some of the Georgian buildings seems to have a soft skin-tone like complexion about it I had never noticed before. The vivid turquoise of the copper roofed churches sprang out at me, particularly that of the great domed church in Rathmines. Yet these colours as striking as they are do not speak specifically of Dublin, I imagine that similar colours exist in London or elsewhere. So the search goes on.

With this in mind I fell back to consult with some of the past masters of this exercise. I went to O’Connell bridge to see the colours in the Liffey, I could distinctly make out the colours that Jack B. Yeats’ had seen there and rendered. Although in these dimmer months the colours seemed more muted than he had invisaged. I wondered if even in the right light the colours that Yeats had seen were representative of the Dublin I know.

This led me to consider Kavanagh as I went to stroll along the Grand Canal which runs nearby my home. I walked for a spell to listen to the locks ‘niagarously’ roaring and to find the ‘stilly greeny’ water alongside which Kavanagh wished to be and is commemorated by. The sounds which I wanted to find as dramatic and lyrical as Kavanagh had were somewhat swamped by the now constant deadlock of traffic idling at the lights on their way into the city centre. Luckily the colours could not be affected by any noise. The waters still have the same stillness and deep mossy green colours I suspect Kavanagh must have seen. They are marred a little by the floating milkshake cartons and tesco bags but none the less these colours are there and they are beautiful.

The trees in these autumnal months in the city’s greens and along its lusher streets were honestly quite arresting. They did not simply take on the dried brown colour I had assumed they would, and may still later in the month, but a spectrum of shades encapsulating lemony yellows, lime greens and rich, velvet reds. Though with slight dismay I realised that many of these trees, and I should note I am not a botanist, particularly in gardens seemed to be of foreign ancestry. Many of the more lively colours came from trees I am convinced were oriental in origin.

I was adament and confident that the city would spring forth colours which were uniquely her own and although it now seemed obvious that I had been doing the city a disservice by considering it to be so dull a place I had still seen nothing which really made me feel was authenticly indigenous. I was at first a little dissappointed that I couldn’t distinguish a lot which was uniquely of the fair city. I took this as a failure either on my part or perhaps more seriously as a failing of the city itself.

I was disillisioned until I considered how in a way the colours and their origins actually reflect perfectly on what Dublin is, it is a city of its people and a city of its history, to my eye the colours reflect this. As hackneyed as it is to say and no one was more surprised than me that I came to this conclusion, Dublin is now a city which is to some extent – and more so every day – multi-cultural.

This is evidenced by the restaurants we eat in, the languages on our adverts, the faces on our streets and as I dicovered, by the colours in our surroundings. As well as this it is a city with a colonial past still just within living memory and it has been home to a diverse range of societies, civilisations and cultures for millenia. If we see our man-made capital like this then surely we should accept that the colours will reflect that history and as far as I could see they do, and beautifully so.

I hope that soon we see this cornucopia of colours reflected, as Lenny Abrahamson showed us is possible, in many more artistic endeavours, cinematic or otherwise.

- Brian P Fortune

This entry was posted by Neil Keating, on Monday, 12 November 2007. You can leave your response.