Colours

Written 1st February 2024 (posted 27th April 2025)

There is  a phrase that says the opposite of love is not hate, it's fear. I very much believe that. And many times when we are scared of something it’s because we don’t understand it. I know this isn’t always the case, but you get the point…

I almost started by saying ‘I’ve always hated maths.’ And yep, I did feel a kind of ‘hatred’ for maths. I just couldn’t do it. Multiplications? Nope. Algebra? Sorry, who? Trigonometry? I still don’t know whether that’s a calculation or a type of dinosaur. So for most of my life maths, and even just looking at numbers, made me feel anxious, scared and stupid. For that reason I, along with a good chunk of the population I reckon, ‘hated maths’. 

But I love animals. And I love flowers. And I love trees. And music and dancing and painting. And colours. I guess I could say I love the universe and all the bonkers things that we humans have created to make ourselves smile. And about a year ago I started realising that at the heart of it all was some kind of pattern. In fact, many patterns. Patterns in the number of petals on a flower, patterns between the steps of a dance and the music that was playing. Patterns in our bodies that connect to the patterns of a pineapple and a snail shell and the whole spinning universe. And I started to see that the language of this spinning universe - the music and the colour pallet it was painting itself in - was, much to my dismay, maths. 

Ugh. Bleurgh. Ew. No. 

Thats one way to describe the feeling I had when everything seemed to be pointing to maths and calculations and those pointy sharp things called numbers. 

The date today is the 1st of February 2024, and over the last month, and through a series of random events, (both in the world I see with my eyes open and the world I see with my eyes closed) I seem to have found a new way to look at maths. The foundations of maths at least. I’m not really sure how to present it but I know there’s a book of some sort bubbling away in my brain, and this morning while I was swimming in a lake a kingfisher flew over my head and I watched as it zipped across the water and up out of my sight. So I’m going to start putting these ideas together before it flies out of my sight too.

I am no mathematician. In fact I struggled to say what 5 + 7 is without counting on my fingers. But give me two colours and I can see what they would look like if you mixed them together. Give me a shadow underneath someone’s chin as the sun is going down and I would know how to paint it. I guess my brain is more of a colour calculator. For many people, colour is something we intuitively understand. It is not just a bonus feature of life, it helps us read the world around us. It affects our emotions and it helps us remember things. As a painter I am always trying to understand how to best use colours when creating things.

Orange was the first colour that changed my life. I was on a little boat in Varanassi, India, and I was watching the sun rise through a purple haze above the Ganges river. It was the most orange orange I had ever seen, and it seemed to literally burn through my eye balls into my brain, shake me by the shoulders and told me to look at the world in a different way. I was a Jehovah’s Witness at the time, trying to convince people to believe what I told them. But that orange sun silently shouted at me to wake up and see what was around me. An ancient city covered with orange. Orange flowers piled onto the bodies of the dead as they were carried through the streets past holy men wrapped in orange fabric, hundreds of children wearing orange as they tangled their bodies into impossible positions on the same steps where the dead would finally pass into a new life through a blazing fire…of orange. Orange was showing me just how bold belief can be. I began to understand that someone else’s truth was just as true to them as mine was to me. It was just a different colour. 

It was at that point that I started to realise I was carrying something that had died too. My faith, my belief and my whole identity as a Jehovah’s Witness would soon come to an end, and I’d have to find my own way of passing into a new life too (preferably without having to burn to ash on the ganges river…Not yet at least.) That sunrise changed my life, and from then on orange was no longer just a colour, but a symbol of hope, whatever that may look like.

LOL that got pretty intense there. But hey ho, I’m not even sure who I’m expecting to read this anyway. La la la…

I had a phrase come into my head a few years ago - ‘Leaves are the map of the tree.’ I didn’t really know what it meant, but I thought maybe it was some kind of idea that leaves are a map of the tree’s root system, or a reflection of the structure of its trunk and branches. It was a very vague thought, but it was enough for me to fleetingly think ‘I’m going to study this at university and prove that this phrase has some kind of truth behind it.’ Alas, I am not completing a PhD yet, but it definitely gave me a little nudge to look at the universe in a different way. 

Then I read a book about trees and for the first time in my life I felt a bit hopeless. Pointless. In comparison to trees, humans just seemed so selfish and meaningless. Trees exist so gracefully and beautifully and we’ve just come along and muffed it all up. I’ve always been quite naturally optimistic, but for a good month or so I really lost grip of seeing anything worthwhile and wholly good in the world of humans. It really got to me. All I wanted to do was lay down and read about how pointless things were in a slightly dark goal of finding the off button. It was at this point when my belly started saying ‘maths’ and ‘India’, quite unignorably. I knew that I had experienced a lot of clarity in India before (the whole orange thing) so that part made sense, but the maths thing…not so much. I started telling my friends ‘I’m going to India and I’m going to sit under a tree and learn maths’, and my friends replied with ‘Sure. Ok, Brook.’ And yes, for a bouncy arty guy who turns into a tap dancing zebra and can’t tell the time on a twenty four hour clock, it was weird. But it genuinely felt like the only next logical step. Jehovah’s Witness - portrait painter - tap dancing zebra - maths. Yep. Completely obvious trajectory. 

Before I set off, I went to visit my hometown, St. Leonards-On-Sea. I typed into YouTube ‘patterns in nature’ and clicked on the first video that came up. It explained the maths behind cheetah spots, giraffe patches and zebra stripes. Being part zebra myself sometimes, I was very much hooked. It went on to explain morphogenesis, a process studied by the mathematician Alan Turing. I had heard of Alan a few years before, but I didn’t really appreciate how much he had achieved or how his work had changed and saved the lives of so many people. Due to his sexuality however, he was arrested and eventually took his own life as a result. I was crying by the end of the video. Suddenly this mathematician from another century felt like a close friend I had lost. Another story of how a lack of understanding had lead to fear, fear had lead to hatred and hatred had lead to death. I was pretty heartbroken. 

As if I wasn’t emotional enough already, I googled Alan and discovered that he had spent his childhood in a house just around the corner from my childhood home. So I put on my shoes and walked less than five minutes up the road and there it was, the house Alan had lived in over a hundred years ago. In my dramatic, theatrical way, I wrote him a little letter in my journal. I told him how sad I was knowing how badly he had been treated, how inspired I was to get better at maths, and that I would try, somehow, to make some kind of mathematical thing that would make him proud. Even if I still didn’t know my three times tables. 

I packed my bag, threw in my paintbrushes, my zebra leotard and a basic maths textbook and waved goodbye to Alan’s house. A benefit of growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness is that you don’t really have any deep rooted Christmas tradition, so I didn’t mind being on my own thousands of feet in the air eating air plane food for the good lord’s birthday, and that meant I could get a very cheap flight to India. After a slight detour involving a lot of google translate and a brief stop in someone’s great grandmother’s attic, I reached what I now understand was my destination. Munroe Island. 

I arrived at Santa Maria hostel around midnight and I didn’t sleep at all that night. Before I even got out of bed in the morning I planned to go completely back on myself and take a two day train journey up to Mumbai in the hope of getting a New Year’s Eve gig as Debra the Zebra. But the universe had a different agenda. I came out of the hostel, jumped into the lake and climbed straight back out with half a broken shell sticking out of my foot. An Italian lady proceeded to pour turmeric powder into the gaping wound and wrap it with an old bandage. Despite the blood running down my leg and the obvious fact I wouldn’t be able to walk for a good while, I started laughing. My plan to escape to Mumbai was cancelled, and instead I found myself sat looking at the lake with my leg in the air and a foot that was very, very orange. 

The next day, the 29th December, I remembered the M word. I dragged a table under a tree and sat with the textbook and my leg up on a chair. Sweet goodness me it was going to be a THRILLING time. I could tell. 

The number line. Negative numbers. Rational numbers. Whooptie doo.

30th December 2023:

Fractions. Adding fractions. Subtracting fractions. I was just about managing to get some right answers, but I felt like I needed to take a step back even further, it felt like I was trying to write poems before I knew how to spell. 

I looked up chisanbop, a korean hand counting method. I kind of got the hang of it, but it didn’t seem to spark anything in my brain enough to see any patterns. So I tried the abbacus. I’d say I gave it a good go. But lord above it was pretty dry. Especially when no one is making you do it and you’re having to motivate yourself. The leaves on the tree provided some motivation and reminded me why I was doing it though, or attempting to do it at least. And there were far worse places to try and learn maths - I don’t remember being able to see the sunset over a lake at the end of my math classes at school, but maybe I was looking out the wrong window. Still, I felt a long way off being competent, and no amount of sunsets through any number of leaves seemed to promise much of a breakthrough. Or at least…thats what I thought.

Dramatic pause.

Then a tiny spark flashed in my brain. I wondered whether there could be a way to translate the science behind the properties of light waves and my ability to identify and mix colours. This is a bit tricky to write down, bare with me, but I looked up the wavelengths of each colour on the electromagnetic spectrum and tried to see whether calculations could be worked out when you ‘mixed’ the wavelengths to create a new colour. I painted the sunset very simply and assigned numbers to each colour. The sun changing from yellow (500) to orange (450) to red (470), the blue water (600) and the green trees (550). Considering I was still struggling to grapple with 6 plus 5, I quickly realised this wasn’t quite the right path to take… But it I was in the right forest.

31st December 2023:

December 31st 2023, and instead of seeing in the new year prancing around as a zebra in Mumbai, I was sat doing primary level maths from a textbook I wanted to smash my head open with. 

I still hadn’t been to the hospital about my foot, and someone said I should probably get it checked and properly cleaned to make sure it didn’t get infected and fall off. So I hopped, literally, into a rickshaw and went to the hospital. A catholic nun named Pushpa, which means flower in the Malayalam language, told me to sit on the bed and she took off my makeshift bandage. She reopened the wound to clean it, I screamed quite a bit, she giggled and told me off for not having come sooner, and I promised to come back in a few days. 

On the journey back to the hostel, and now feeling a lot better knowing my foot had been blessed and dressed by a nun, I finally had a chance to see the island I had been staying on for the last few days. Colours. Just loads of colours. Bold colours who knew exactly who they were. None of the shy, apologising colours we see a lot of in England. Punchy pinks. Yelling yellows. Raging reds. Brilliant bl…you get the gist. Blues and purples blurring past on a backdrop of green as I bounced through the forest in a rickshaw. The island wasn’t letting me give up on this colour idea, and when I got back under the tree, I gave it another go. 

I painted out the rainbow. Maybe the wavelength idea wasn’t quite right, but I felt like I was getting close. I simplified it. I counted the colours. 

Red. Orange. Yellow. Green. Blue. Purple. 

Six colours from my paint set. 

I looked at the base of the tree I was sat under and the ground it was growing from. Brown. 

Seven colours. 

Black. 

White. 

Nine colours. One more would make ten.

PINK. How could I forget PINK?!

Then, in a moment I think I may look back on as one of the most important of my life (I’m so dramatic) I painted them out at the top of the page…

0 - white

1 - black

2 - brown 

3 - pink

4 - red

5 - orange 

6 - yellow

7 - green

8 - blue

9 - purple

And so, quite significantly I feel, I painted my number line as the sun set on the last day of brown white brown pink. 

I had my numbers, and was finally equipped to face my fear…