I always thought that seeing a new colour would be like giving an Egyptian, say, or some other ancient, an object to touch that was made of plastic. What? It floats? It is light and hard, durable, might even shatter? Surely it is a type of glass or wood veneer? And they would chatter wide-eyed about it, as lively as children.

There is nothing familiar to us inscribed in the natural order that is exactly like bakelite. And so we only come to understand its perfect surface and delicate weight, to accept it, after we have held it in our hands, knowing its synthetic birth. This is precisely like the new colour.

Nobody alive had seen it before; it wasn’t strange, really, or merely emphasized and given a special quality like luminescent paint or the rough texture of gold: it simply fitted somewhere between the others, like yellow or blue.

A flower. A temperate island off West Africa; there, an anthropologist called Dr. Philippe de Man, fell upon the dainty specimen, not especially peculiar in other respects, and quickly announced it, freely, to the entire world.

There was, however, no frenzy. For the first time in our history, it seems, we all just stood still and watched, sensibly. Two processes began to find their momentum: first, that the colour be practiced, attempted, finally accepted into our visual universe and associated as naturally as possible according to certain reflections or discreet echoes which none of us, before, had been able to discern. Like red with fire or blood, blue with the ocean or the sky, green with vegetation and youth – so the new colour illuminated its own companions and meanings, like a buttercup secretly shining on a chin from underneath.

Second, our scientists were afforded the pleasure of decoding the mystery: how had they not predicted the colour from the electromagnetic spectrum that was already itself comprehended? Why had the hue not announced itself on our various colour-wheels or anywhere else in nature? The first thing to be understood, with not a little aid from Dr. de Man himself, was that our ancestors, some of the earliest, who had lived and passed over the island, had been in contact with the flower before, hence our own ability to perceive its colour today. Connected to this understanding, it was discovered that the petals of the flower could be prepared and ingested, producing an effect not unlike a potent, but controlled shot of caffeine – more vivid, and clear, calm, precise. The colour was shown to be the product of three layers of separate pigments interacting together, which elicited a very particular wave resonance, physicists declared. It was simply a case of being ‘known to maths’ but ‘not to practice’.

In my own case, the new colour was like a pall-cloth – descending silently and without explanation over my own head. My paintings took the colour on very quickly, and I soon realised how it was the ‘quality of the new’ that it most directly represented. But my subjects held its flower between their intricate fingers, staring in the fullest abandonment into its light, and their eyes would always stiffen under my brush, however I tried, glazing over. It was like an autumn leaf, this death of the eyes, the hour it browns or snaps in-half. Or like a royal sarcophagus, now cheapened in something that is neither wood nor stone.

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