Iridescence in Painting and Poetry
Part I: Double Rainbows and Good Stuff Cookies
How do you relate an experience of rare, intense feeling–the good stuff? Joy, love, and ecstasy have an “iridescent” quality, an iridescence that can’t be seen, but must be felt.
Iridescent feelings, like iridescent phenomena in nature, defy verbal description, but our desire to share them anyway has led to some of the most beautiful and compelling art in the world. The difficulty of saying the unsayable demands experimentation with language. To do this, poets and painters test the limits of form and medium to push against stale norms and boring conventions.
*Iridescence is a four-pepper blend made with equal parts transparent color, hard-edged light, motion, and surprise. Note: You’ll need 2 cups of iridescence for 2 dozen cookies. Sleep is called for in an odd fractional quantity, so go for the double rainbow rather than attempt to divide ¾ c. sleep in half.
One way to recreate iridescence in paint is to layer several transparent colors in the same place at once. William Turner made a career out of this.
William Turner ate iridescence for breakfast and probably sprinkled a dash on a boiled egg or two at tea. I once saw pictures on the internet of Turner’s townhouse in Chelsea when it was up for sale in 2023. Oh, to have won the lottery in time! In one photo you can see several canisters of iridescence that Turner kept on the dining room fireplace mantel.
Turner’s painting exhibits all four ingredients of iridescence: transparent color, hard-edged light, motion, and surprise.
Transparent Color: In Turner’s painting, the dark colors are transparent and the light colors are opaque. Layers of transparent color can mimic the way colors dance in a waterfall rainbow.
Hard-edged Light always gets the center of attention. The dot of the sun has a hard edge. It’s not blended into the background colors. The almost white spot of yellow in sharp contrast with darkest dark reds and the hazy sfumato of the sea and sky makes it pop.
Motion, the third ingredient, is here, too, in Turner’s painterly directional brushstrokes that arc from sea to sky. With his lively brushwork, the sea shimmers and the sky churns.
Surprise: This is the ingredient I never noticed before I started doing these sketchbook studies. Look at the way Turner layers opaque gray-blue over the dark, transparent colors of the sky. What is that object coming toward us in the fog? It’s this partial obscuration of something bright and shining that adds the element of surprise. It’s almost as if something iridescent and magical was hidden behind some kind of cloak and we are the first to witness it.
Gouache (rhymes with “squash”) is watercolor that’s opaque, so it behaves a little bit like oil paint. You can put lighter colors on top of darker ones, something that’s impossible with purely transparent colors. I was able to get the same effect on paper using layers of opaque white on top of the darker transparent layers.
What can poets gain from studying paintings of rainbows? Poems themselves can be Good Stuff Cookies, but without that dash of iridescence they fall flat. Poets can make the four pepper blend using words. I think of “transparent words” as words with multiple interpretations. When a poet uses transparent words, the reader gets the experience of “seeing” several things at once.
One of my favorite painters, Richard Schmid, offered a simple instruction for painting: put the right color in the right place, but with iridescence, it’s not so easy to identify the colors and where they are. Iridescence in nature needs motion, a change in perspective. In poetry this is the turn, the volta. Poets also get a shift in perspective using metaphor. An object is one thing, then it’s another. Poetry has the power to make leaps in time and space.
My Heart Leaps Up
William Wordsworth
1770 –1850
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
Iridescence in nature is complex and multicolored, making it difficult to describe in words and paint. Painters and poets have struggled to capture the feeling of being in that moment—the brilliant flash of a butterfly wing, the expanse of a double rainbow, or a spiderweb and hold it still for as long as we want to look. The hummingbird’s turn towards the light leaves us speechless, fumbling for ways to express our feelings of wonder and surprise. Attempting to say what is ultimately unsayable, we are tongue tied with the desire to share this rare and euphoric experience that’s bound to shifting perspective and sunlight. You had to be there. The double rainbow in the sky isn’t half as important as the one you have behind your eyelids. See James Galvin’s poem Double Rainbow.
Definition: a feeling is iridescent if it’s one you have to dance around in order to describe.
Encounters with iridescence in nature inspire us to want to share feelings that undulate like waves of colored light in a mist. We want to capture the moment, put it into a jar so we can hold onto it and revisit it. It’s unfortunate that as young artists we are doomed from the beginning, commanded to create rainbows given thick poster paints. It can take a lifetime of experimenting to find ways to make our colors dance.
Below is a viral video filmed by Paul "Bear" Vasquez, a.k.a. “Double Rainbow Guy.” This clip, which Vasquez filmed himself in his front yard just outside Yosemite National Park in California, is Good Stuff Cookies—three-and-a-half minutes of pure joy. As of today, Double Rainbow has accumulated over 51 million views on YouTube and more than 95,000 comments that will restore your faith in humanity. Vasquez died of Covid in 2022, but he gave us this. Happy Friday!
Kelly, what a delightful way to start my day, beauty with breakfast. I enjoyed your post so much. I haven’t painted in a while and it was such an immersion in that feeling of seeing what comes from the colors and the mixing and experimenting. I’m painting with words these days instead and I love the way you draw the two experiences together. Brilliant, thank you!