Two fundamental properties of any painting are its colours and its forms. References to colours, forms, their attributions and correspondences occur throughout all hermetic writings. The ‘unity in diversity’ that underpins the natural world is uncovered through the study of correspondences. All of matter is linked through a multiplicity of properties, of which colour is one and form is another. Certain colours and particular forms held particular significance for Colquhoun.
The symbolic importance of colour is first seen in Aaron Meeting Moses in the Desert (1932). Colquhoun has taken particular care to depict Aaron’s priestly robes, with their symbolic colours, with great accuracy. In a work of only two years later, Design for a painting on Silk (1934), a more hermetic colour theory is at work. In her notes of explanation Colquhoun makes several references to the colour scales which govern depictions of the Qabalistic Tree of Life.
In this, as in so much of her work, her explanatory framework is that provided by MacGregor Mathers and amplified by Golden Dawn teachings. This is evident for instance, in The Thirteen Streams of Magnificent Oil (c1940) in which her adherence to Golden Dawn colour attributions for the painting of the limbs and torso of the human body is particularly striking. In her series of Alchemical Figures, however, whilst her choice of colours is often determined by reference to GD schemes, it is less slavishly so. One difficulty in understanding works such as these is that there are different schemes of colour attributions, depending on tradition and particular magical purpose. For example, some of the colours in the male figure in Alchemical Figure (1940) correspond to the King Scale whilst others do not. A further complication is that there are instances where she was prepared to deviate deliberately from accepted practice. Ceremonial magic is, after all, active and experiential. Magicians would expect to use established ideas as a starting point for their own researches rather than as a confining straitjacket.
Following her adoption of automatism, one of the few conscious decisions available to her at the start of the image-making process was the selection of colours. It is significant that two colours, red and blue, predominate in the initial blots or stains. They are sometimes augmented by a third; yellow. This is something of an oversimplification, and Colquhoun used colour with far greater subtlety that the statement would seem to allow. Nonetheless the combination is seen in many of the major oil decalcomanias of the 1940s, including Tendrils of Sleep (1944; A Visitation I (1945) and Gorgon (1946}.
Red and blue are the traditional hermetic colours of the male and female principles which come together to form life and which must be transcended if the alchemist is to achieve the Great Work. Rivulets of red and blue, suggestive of the ribbon of life, are seen in Ages of Man (1944); the earlier, non-automatic, Rivières Tièdes (1939) and Abstract, Vegetation (c. 1944). The presence of yellow in the last named can be taken to mean that we are witnessing a moment of creation. Hermetically, it signifies the essential fire that sparks life and animates matter. Bolts of divine fire flash across the sky and ribbons of red and blue meander in parallel across a landscape before plunging underground, later to emerge together as a budding organic plant form.
Colours carry many meanings. In one of the Golden Dawn rituals it is proclaimed that "colours are forces and the signatures of forces". The implication of this is that colour can be an avenue into worlds other than the one recognised in everyday perception. Colour applied to certain objects and allied with certain mental praxes could be the instrument of a change in consciousness. The Golden Dawn devised its own colour scale, a kind of hermetic colour wheel, known as the Rose of Twenty-Two Petals or the Rose Cross. In the Rose, colour symbolism is combined with the colour attributes of the elements, the planets, the zodiac, the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the 22 paths of the Tree of Life to give a complex colour code of mystical knowledge.
The originators of the Rose were aware of contemporary colour theory and the importance of complimentarity. Using the Rose, the Order advocated, for example, that the sigils of the zodiacal signs should be painted each in its appropriate colour upon a background of its spectral opposite in order to obtain maximum visual impact. Several of Colquhoun’s published papers on alchemy deal with the importance of colour in magic and ritual. In one, for example, she gave practical advice on how to obtain the maximum psychic impact from zodiacal and other sigils by painting them in the appropriate colours, saying that "a sigil does not begin to live until it is represented in colour". (1) In another, she dealt specifically with the role of colour in elucidating the meanings contained within the complex alchemical text known as the Golden Chain of Homer. (2)
As another part of her own magical activities Colquhoun produced charts, glyphs and sigils as aids to contemplation and reflection. Colour frequently played a key part of these devices. She believed that the use of gold and silver leaf (the metals gold and silver stand for the male and female principles, respectively), was universal in early magical, especially alchemical, designs (3). It is noteworthy that a number of her own works with clear magical content, such as Star Painting (1964) with its depiction of several sephirah, made use of either gold or silver foil as required. She also pointed out (4) that Golden Dawn order papers recommended that sigils be painted in enamel paint, in order to give the right opacity and intensity of colour. It may be, therefore, that her extensive use of enamel paint in later years owed something to magical influences as well as painterly or artistic ones.
Notes
1. Colquhoun, I. The Zodiac and the Flashing Colours, Hermetic Journal,1979. pp 5-7.
2. See: Colquhoun, I. Notes on the Colouring of the Homer's Golden Chain Diagram, Hermetic Journal, 1979. no 6 pp 15-17.
3. Colquhoun, I. The Zodiac and the Flashing Colours, op cit.
4. Colquhoun, I. Colour and the Two Sigils, Hermetic
Journal,1979. pp 8-9.
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