This White is not that one just as this Blue isn't that one.
The consistencies of colour vary much more for an artist than anybody else.
We see shades within shades.
The colour palettes of our imagination and vision contain many more names of colours than what is conventionally known and taught and told.
And so, we let an object or an element or natural phenomena or visuals stand in as a fair, pointed, correct description of the colour we desire.
In the interiors of Saurashtra, where I thought I was teaching a bunch of village women painting and acquainting them with mixed mediums of fine art, a lesson so deep was delivered to me, I couldn't have been hit in the heart harder and all at once, made this soft.
"Please pick out your white tubes of paint to colour your Art on the black and blank canvases you have all prepared yesterday," I said one afternoon, in follow up to the preparatory work done on the day before.
Shaili's gaze drifted. She was no longer amongst us, in class. She was looking out onto the horizon and dreaming with a glint in her eyes that is too often the look of artists who have transcended space, time and choose only and constantly to travel.
I repeated my instructions only for her benefit.
With the same faraway look in her eyes, she poetically asked,
"Which White?
That of the moon?
Or the white of a cloud?
The white of paper?
Or the white of a rose?
The white of ice? The white of salt? The white of milk or the white of a conch shell?
The white of a waterfall? The white of the Desert of Rann? Or that of smoke?"
"The white of a swan.", were the only words I could find to say.
For she had flown into another realm that day.