When Andrew announced that he was holidaying in the French Alps over Christmas and asked for some homework, I charged him with the task of finding out what colour snow was. On his return, he emailed me the conversation he'd had with his four-year-old grand-daughter, Jodie, which I reproduce here with his permission:
A: Jodie, what colour is the snow?
J: White.
A: Are you sure?
J: Yes.
A: What colour is the picnic table on the balcony?
J: White.
A: But it's not the same colour as the snow.
J: No.
A: And it's still white?
J: Yes.
A: What colour are the walls of this room?
J: White.
A: And they are a different colour from the snow and the table, and they are still white?
J: Yes. And those are white (pointing to the kitchenette tiling).
A: But not the same colour as the others?
J: No.
"So there we have a reliable observer,'" wrote Andrew, "unshakeable under cross examination."
Monet, who made a habit of painting the snow, didn't seem to be quite so certain. Here are the colours Monet uses for snow in four different paintings. Of course, they're not single colours but complex juxtapositions of complementaries.
The sample, second from the left looks like the kind of snow that Frank Zappa warned us about and apart from the one on the far right, the others seem way off the mark. But if we accept that white light stimulates all three colour-sensitive cone cells on the human retina, then looking at snow can give us the impression that we're looking at many colours rather than none. In that case, painting snow need not be a matter of merely blanking in a region of nothingness between other more interesting landscape elements. Instead, like Monet, we can work with every colour under the sun.
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