Violet
In the beginning of time, where were you? What did you look like before things? A dot in the darkness; or a shining light; a void, a deep eddying tunnel of silence, where nothing was; or a bright whip of colour that engulfed and enveloped and flattened out space; or were you a scattering of luminous dust particles, iridescent seeds that delighted in entropy. I wish to know the truth of things; I wish to know what is absolute; I wish to know how the image came into being; how consciousness came into being from the void, the dark place, the dot. If I sit still and close my eyes, will I see it?
Let’s purport then, that there was a single colour, a big sheet of it. An infinite curtain that stretched out, and that colour was purple: a Dioxazine Violet, an electric-technic-coloured one, with acid in its fronds.
Why Dioxazine Violet?
It is sensual I say. It has a metaphysical sexuality, intense. It bruises. Violet is warm and licks off the tongue. In Russia, they see violet as standing between red and blue, a cold-red; a royal colour, it has a glassy, gemmy untouchability.
Last year, I came across an array of synthetic dyes with such vivid intrinsic colour that I started using it for painting. Emerald green, acid yellow, electric blue and traffic-cone orange formed new constellations in my visual vocabulary. I noted that when you put Dioxazine Violet pigment undiluted onto a canvas, it is the most glorious inky shadow. A dark heart and brooding, you can’t capture the colour on your iPhone photo, as it shows up black. It’s too elegant for that: you need an advanced sensor to capture the deep purple.
Dioxazine Violet is visceral. It cuts sharp, hurts, vibrates under the skin. The colour throbs, and if you dilute the pigment with water, it tinkers off into a sweet hue of lavender that rests delicately on the page, a puff perfume. Dioxazine violet is sensual.
Don’t touch, Saint Teresa, just tell me what you saw?
Slowly, she spoke, “I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it.”