The Richest Color: Gray, and the Empty Spaces of a Painting

Spaces between
Written by Vincent Ganne
Spaces between2-minute read

The Richest Color: Gray, and the Empty Spaces of a Painting

Why so much of my palette is gray.

The eye can tell apart some 500 shades of gray. Paul Klee called it the richest color.

When I paint, I use a lot of gray. Not as a compromise, but as a possibility.

Paul Klee called gray the richest color, “the one that makes all the others speak.” The human eye can tell apart some five hundred shades of it, endless variations. Each one holds options, potentialities that haven’t yet collapsed into certainty. On its own, gray is mute. But it is easily “excited to thrilling resonances,” as the Bauhaus painter Johannes Itten wrote. Lay a stroke of red ochre beside it and it warms. Touch it with blue and it cools to river fog.

Negative space works the same way. The unpainted part of a canvas isn’t absence. It’s room: room to try something, to fail, to sit with the white page or the white canvas before you commit. Often the most important decision in a painting is what to leave untouched.

We rarely give ourselves that room anywhere else. A gap between two tasks, a pause in a conversation, and we rush to fill it. Somewhere along the way, being busy got tangled up with being worth something. If we’re not producing, not responding, not visibly doing, are we even valuable? But boredom might be a gateway, not an enemy.

Boredom might be a gateway, not an enemy.

In the Lot, everything and everyone still waits and listens. You learn that the wind smells different brushing over the cornfields before a storm than it does coming off the river. You learn to read the weather in the sky before it arrives. Contemporary life would call this wasted time, standing around noticing things. Yet these empty hours are where my work actually takes shape. I still paint in the gaps of the day.

Think of the relief when plans fall through and an afternoon suddenly opens. We could give ourselves that gift daily: the right to delay turning a page, to pause and reread the same line. The line stays the same. The moment changes, and so does what we take from it.

Gray, a corner of canvas left bare, an hour with nothing in it: none of them is empty. They are what a thing looks like just before it becomes something. Leave a little of that space open, and the next moment has somewhere to land.

Vincent Ganne
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Attention as Generosity: Lessons from the Truffle Hunter