That elusive something

There’s a central chapter in Moby Dick where the narrator Ishmael traces his fascination with the whale to the colour white. For all its associations ‘with whatever is sweet, and honourable, and sublime’, he feels that ‘there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood’. Could it be, he wonders, that ‘by its indefiniteness …it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation?’

Ishmael is on to something here. Chromatically, as the colourless sum of all colours, white is already enough of a contradiction; symbolically, it’s a whole new can of worms. The colour of lilies, doves, milk, snow and bridal veils is also the colour of ghosts, mould, Avenging Angel mushrooms, white rot, bones and death. On the day I visit The Art of White at The Lowry, it is also the colour of the sky over Manchester, wrapped in what Kenneth Clark romantically described as a ‘perpetual, pearly mist’ but the woman behind me on the Manchester Metrolink sums up as ‘foggy though, innit?’