The Colours of Nature: Blackish Grey
- Emma Butler
- May 31, 2024
- 4 min read
The colour of clouds, heavily laden with rain, 'Blackish Grey' isn't an uplifting colour. Colours such as this, however, are often found in nature and are visually important in providing a neutral backdrop for more vibrant colours. In the book Nature's Palette, this colour is given the references of flint, the back of the nuthatch and old stems of hawthorn. The more I see of this colour, the more I notice it in art and in the natural world and I'm surprised at just how many beautiful things are grey.
Two artists that used grey to great effect in their work were Albert Bierstadt and Arthur Rackham. These artists had very different styles but created great atmosphere using dark, moody colours.
Left: 'Lake Tahoe', oil on canvas, 1868.
Right: 'A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie', oil on canvas1866.
Albert Bierstadt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (both pictures).
Left: 'The fairies have their tiffs with the birds', pen ink and watercolour (1906)
Right: 'Girl Beside a Stream', watercolour (1920s)
Both pictures from the book 'Arthur Rackham: A life with illustration' by James Hamilton (2010).
I gained a new appreciation for greys when I started using watercolours and watched Brian Ashmore's videos on YouTube. He frequently uses Payne's grey in his work, which includes artwork for the comic graphic novel 'Batman Absolution'. I fell in love with this blue-grey and it's been on my watercolour palette ever since. The two art material references for the colour 'Blackish Grey' are given in Nature's Palette as both the Winsor and Newton and Caran d'Ache versions of Payne's grey, which was one of the reasons I chose to feature 'Blackish Grey' on the blog.
Animal Reference: Back of Nuthatch (Sitta europaea)
The nuthatch has been recorded on the Isle of Man (see the Manx List on the Manx Birdlife website) but is a rare species here and is more commonly seen in Wales, England and southern Scotland. These are small woodland birds, which have the unusual skill of being able to climb down trees head first. They have large heads, short tails and a woodpecker-like bill, suited to their feeding habits of eating insects, seeds and nuts.
These birds have a rust-coloured belly, a black eye stripe and a grey colouring to the upper part of their body, the part of the bird given as the reference for the colour 'blackish grey'. The grey almost looks blue in some lights and so the Winsor and Newton and Caran d'Ache colour references of Payne's grey are very appropriate. Payne's grey Winsor and Newton watercolour and Caran d'Ache luminance pencil were used in the sketch of a nuthatch below:
Vegetable Reference: Old Stems of Hawthorn
The common hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna), known as Drine Bane in Manx, is very common on the Isle of Man and has huge value to wildlife as both a source of food and as a shelter. These trees are easy to spot at this time of year as they're covered in white flowers each May, leading to it being referred to as the May Tree. There are lots of superstitions and folklore associated with this plant, including the belief that it's unlucky to bring them into the house or to eat them. To read more on this see the Hawthorn entry on the Wild Flowers of the Isle of Man website. Apparently, many people find the smell of hawthorn flowers unpleasant and they were thought to smell of the Great Plague in medieval times. The reason for this has been found to be due to the flowers releasing the compound trimethylamine, which is one of the first chemicals to be released by a rotting animal corpse.
The berries of the hawthorn plant are known as 'skeg' in Manx and there's a wonderful account on the 'As Manx as the Hills' website about how hawthorn hedges used to be planted on the Isle of Man. The ingenious method involved inserting the 'skegs' or hawthorn seeds into a length of 'suggane' (straw rope) at regular intervals. The rope could then be buried in a trench where a hedge was desired and after two years, the hawthorn would germinate in a perfectly straight line. Genius!
Mineral Reference: Flint
Flint is a form of microcrystalline quartz, known as 'chert'. It's highly resistant to weathering and is a great material for making sharp-edged tools due to it splitting into sharp pieces when struck. The process of striking a piece of flint to create a useful object is known as 'flintknapping' and was used to make such items as knife blades, axes, scrapers and arrowheads. The Mesolithic (middle stone age) people of the Isle of Man were the first people to leave traces of their existence on the Island. They used flint to make tools to help them hunt and build, as described in the Manx National Heritage information leaflet 'The Manx Mesolithic (8000BC - 4000BC)'. Some of the flints found over the years can be viewed on the iMuseum website and an account of some of the archaeological excavations that have discovered flint can be found on the 'Round Mounds of the Isle of Man' website.
Flint can be found in colours ranging from off-white to grey and black as well as in sandy-and orange-browns. When I recently visited Normandy, I was delighted to find that many houses in Honfleur have flint incorporated into their structure and that much of this flint was the dark grey colour of 'Blackish Grey'. Many of the builders of these houses had used this quality to add decoration to the walls, as seen in the checkerboard pattern of the building below:
Not enough flint is found on the Isle of Man to be used in this way, although in chalk areas such as Norfolk in England, it occurs in large enough quantities to be used for building. A great example of decorative medieval flintwork can be seen in Norwich Guildhall if you don't want to travel as far as Honfleur to appreciate its beauty.
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