The meaning of green

By Conrad Beaubien

Turns out it’s a multiple personality word. Green that is. I launched into why the image of the green of spring with the 4 o’clock sun riding over the heaves and lowering of newly planted fields fuels my Being; or why when the morning sun cuts through the windbreak of young walnut trees I want to slate the beauty; or further still, the view below as seen from the Ameliasburgh escarpment I appreciate as a gift

This day is a surround-sound rebirth of the earth. Yes, all that. But what’s going on here in the power of the earth’s awakening? By the way, this idea is an image I try to keep stored away and retrieve whenever I look over the banks of the creek and into the snow-drenched ground cover and chaotic tumble of trees and fallen limbs at sundown in February. While I can picture green as in the vermillion green of my favourite coffee mug yet I can’t feel the colour as it had then withdrawn into tentacles of the earth. The image that comes to me is that green will appear like a jack-in-the box when the sun has turned the crank handle a number of days more. Yes, it’s that kind of surprise stored underground that’ll seemingly bolt from the earth in reinvigorated newness.

There is all of that, and yet the symbolism of green goes head-tohead with opposite meanings—life force versus envy and jealousy? Is it a merging of cultural thought that invites this duality? Africa, deemed by anthropologists to be the Motherland of our species, imagines green to mean sovereignty and unity. Eastern cultures see the colour as youth and fertility—but also infidelity. South American cultures rich in forests imagine green as death. And further yet, in some parts of the world, green interprets as prosperity and the greenback dollar. It’s at that point when trying to know too much begins to take away from the emotion of first impression. Just feel the bounty of the sun, the renewal of nature I say. It’s the difference of wanting to intellectually understand and to analyze something when the gift is to simply receive the oxygen of newness.

Drawing from the artist’s way where blue and red wavelengths of the sun are absorbed by chlorophyll while it decides it likes being a photoreceptor reflecting green from the spectrum into our vision as seen in the buds and the leaves and whatever. Why it makes those choices I recommend you ask chlorophyll itself, because most of this is over my head.

What I try to recall beyond the uplift that green offers is learning about how in antiquity, green came from natural green earth and minerals such as malachite, or that Verdigris is a result of exposing copper to acetic acid and scraping the green dust into a beaker. I remember way back when, growing up in Ottawa and walking with a friend past the Parliament Buildings on a fall day and noticing workers high on a section of steep pitched roof of the West Block in the process of replacing sheets of copper covering. My friend was quick to test me with the question of why copper turns green. His theory was that peeing on it prompted the alchemy of uric acid and copper mineral and so on. By the way, he went on to pursue a chemical degree still arguing his point while I stuck to the arts.

At that point I recall trying to fathom the idea of how anyone way up there could hold on until the privacy of night cover in order to urinate while standing on such a treacherous slope; risky business I was certain of. These days, now working on sculptural pieces with aged copper bought at the scrap yard, that early notion from my friend wants me to wash every piece of weathered copper and to wear gloves when unsure of its provenance. That’s one example of how childhood memories make people behave weirdly later in life, or at least that’s how, in my case, I try to explain it.

I attempt to slough off these notions and remind myself that the 19th century introduced new pigments in addition to antique names like Verdigris, and how along with Emerald, Cobalt and Viridian these greens were on the playlist of the impressionist painters. Then along came Phtalo and Chromium Oxide and Viridian and Terre Verte. Again I rise with sympathy for anyone wanting to be a painter back when and who started their path in the artist studio as understudy whose main job was standing at a work counter and spending the first two years grinding minerals with silica clay with mortar and pestle to make paints for the canvases. Don’t get me going on prepping canvases and stretching and coating with gesso so that the minerals don’t eventually eat away at the cloth canvas and all of that or if you happen to have a coffee in hand it’ll be guaranteed to be cold by the time I finish.

So, green is not just a concept for an environmental movement, is what I’m trying to say. Take the noon day sun for instance showering down from the highest treetops of my sugar maple tree. I vouch for the idea that spring green has a language of its own, evasive of verbal description other than just being green.

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