Remarks on Color: Bright White

by Eve Wood | Sep 29, 2020

Kara Walker, "Untitled," 1996

Bright White, forever the blank page, the empty backdrop, illuminating the dreams and desires of other colors – added to, enhanced, augmented, amplified and enlarged – the beginning of everything and the end of nothing – it should be enough just to be yourself, but Bright White demands a Do Over, recompense from centuries of discrimination, being left out of every major world event – a silver rocket set against an indigo sky; Green soldiers running through the verdant underbrush in Saigon, and when the Declaration of Independence was signed, it wasn’t Bright White who soaked in the black ink, but an ochre parchment, another imposter to the throne. The most famous works of art are dangerous and filled with intrigue – Caravaggio’s David holds the red, bloodied head of Goliath, while the only trace of Bright White can be found on the boy’s simple tunic. BW is sexless and bored with himself, an empty life with little hope for excitement or adventure, only a few disparate stars asleep on the horizon. Hell, even the horizon is a soft and generous pink and to think it all starts with Bright White, forever waiting to be acted upon, a clean slate, a fresh canvas, a monumentally empty moment just waiting to be filled. Without white, nothing would be possible; white is the reason the firmament of heaven exists at all, for without the white billowing clouds, we could not see the blue backdrop that frames them there in the sky. It should be duly noted, (according to Bright White) that from this non-color, this innocence, this virginal exemplar of virtue, the entirety of the world derives, in perfect blinding white — the essence of the universe like an exploding star. It should be understood once and for all that everything can be traced back to Bright White, as the world was not forged in fire, but in light.