The Painter With One Colour

There is a small museum in a coastal town that owns forty-two paintings by an artist almost no one has heard of. All forty-two were made in the same year. All forty-two are blue.

The story goes that the painter, who was moderately successful and moderately restless, had reached the point in his career where he had begun to imitate himself. His galleries knew what to expect from him. His collectors knew what to expect. He, worst of all, knew what to expect. He would set up a canvas and could see the finished painting before he had touched it. He was bored, and he was becoming a little cruel to his family without knowing why.

A friend, who was a doctor and not a painter, suggested a strange prescription. 'For one year,' she said, 'use only one colour. Any colour. But only one. See what happens.'

He chose blue because he liked it and because he thought it would be the easiest to survive on. He was wrong about that. Blue, it turned out, was a country. The first month was hell. He mixed blue with white and got pale blue. He mixed blue with black and got dark blue. He got tired of both of them by the third canvas. He nearly quit.

In the second month, out of desperation, he began paying attention to blue the way a hungry person pays attention to food. He noticed that morning blue was not evening blue. He noticed that the blue in the shadow of a white cup was not the blue in the shadow of a green leaf. He noticed that if he laid two blues side by side, one of them would look almost yellow, and if he moved the yellowish one next to a third blue, it would become blue again. He began to see blue everywhere. His wife's eyes were four different blues depending on the light. The tiles of the kitchen were six.

By the sixth month, he could not stop painting. He had discovered that a limitation, taken seriously, was not a wall. It was a door.

The forty-two paintings in the museum are the result of that year. Standing in the small room where they hang, you would swear you were looking at forty-two different colours. Some of them appear green. Some appear grey. Some appear almost warm, almost brown. All of them are blue. The eye, freed from the noise of the whole palette, learns to see distinctions it had been too lazy to notice before.

After the year was over, the painter went back to using every colour. His work became famous, quietly and slowly, over the next two decades. When a young student once asked him what had changed in that year, he did not talk about blue. He talked about attention.

'I had spent twenty years,' he said, 'trying to be more interesting. In that year I had to become more interested. It turns out that interested is what interesting is made of.'

There is a version of this experiment available to almost anyone. You do not have to be a painter. Pick one thing — a route to work, a meal, a person, an hour — and treat it as your only colour for a while. Do not add novelty. Add attention. You will find, more quickly than you expect, that the thing you were bored of was not boring. You had simply stopped looking at it.

Boredom is almost never a property of the world. It is a habit of the eye. And habits, unlike walls, can be repainted.