A Study in Purple
Born in Fez in 1928 Yacoubi was a traditional healer, storyteller, poet, painter, playwright and also, by his own account, a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. A self taught artist, he considered a painting unfinished until he’d played a flute to it, or sang to it, in order to bring it to life. This take on animism fascinated me (here’s a little footage of him playing the flute whilst Paul Bowles plays piano in this experimental film by Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Cocteau, at about the 58 minute mark - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMIBbesWJDA&t=23s)
Yacoubi also used paint straight out of the tube, never mixing colours (until he began hanging out with Francis Bacon, who encouraged him to experiment). This small act, of doing an everyday thing differently to the mainstream, inspired me. How might so much else be done differently, if only we looked at it from a different angle, or even worked to forget what we’d be taught about it. Is painting better if we mix colours? Probably not, you might even say that thinking we can make any colour we see in our world just by mixing tubes of paint (or pixels) could lead us to be complacent about the natural beauty around us.
I was walking between camps in Algonquin Park thinking about this, and how Yacoubi began his career by never mixing colours, visualising his odd and interesting images whilst looking at the shades of green, red, pink and more that surrounded me, when I heard a far away, too-loud, human voice. It was baying banalities to another, statements of outrage and disgust wrapped in the vocal fry so common in the city, and I began thinking of how dishonest so many people are in my home of Toronto. I frequently encounter people there who lie brazenly and it has occurred to me that since they’re otherwise very pleasant people it must be that either telling the truth isn’t valued in their world, or they really don’t know they’re lying. Perhaps they have little experience of anybody in their orbit telling the truth so they struggle to know what it looks like. This wouldn’t be a surprise, if you study the colonial history of Canada you’re inundated with examples of white people making treaties with the indigenous that they clearly never intended to honour. Double-Talk is practically the lingua franca of the dominant culture here, as it seems to be all over North America, the UK, and Northern Europe.
“To ask them to speak truth,” I reasoned as I arrived at my camping area, “would be like giving a person who’d never seen the colour purple, pots of red, white, and blue paint and asking them to mix up a Tyrian purple, or a mulberry, or a heliotrope. They’d struggle, of course.”
With that in mind I decided to paint the scene in front of camp, using just red, blue, and white mixed in shades of purple. Quite the opposite to what a young Yacoubi would have done, most likely, yet it felt right to do this. In a way it was an exercise in melding the natural world and the city life that I mostly inhabit, and a way to turn the spotlight on myself. Could I mix up a Tyrian purple from memory. Probably not. Could I tell the truth? Probably not. A mind game, you could say, yet an enjoyable, testing one at that.
I must confess to having 2 attempts at it, and finishing the second at home a few days later, as I had to consult online sources for examples of what shades such as mauve, thistle, heliotrope, mulberry, French lilac, and Tyrian purple actually looked like. It got me thinking about how I too could do with a refresher of what truth is. The easy path would be to say something like ‘Truth is Objective’. I don’t subscribe to that, one only has to look at a tree growing, straight up as it was meant to, true, as it was meant to be true, to understand that there is such a thing as truth. So ok, I said to myself after painting this, start at the base of that tree trunk, that is true, and now hold onto that point and whenever you meet a statement view it with one hand on that trunk. And if that doesn’t make sense then you’re too far from nature, too far from the truth, and you better get yourself back to the real place quickly.
I enjoyed beginning the painting at camp, and finishing it at home, it was a challenging, educational, experience. As I finished it, quite by chance, Tyrian purple was in the news, in association with the Israeli assault on Tyre. A barbaric assault on the city that gave the colour its name. And, as is usual for the Israelis, an assault on truth.
