Original in Colour

I've been doing a series of square digital images which I have come think of as "a theatre of dreams", not because I'm a Manchester United supporter (I'm not) but because they look like other-worldly tableaux set within the frame of a toy theatre. Generally, there's a central figure selected from my usual ensemble cast of statuary doing something slightly odd in what looks like a stage-set. They're also very colourful, almost garish (a tasteful kind of garish, it goes without saying).

However, it occurred to me that it would be a worthwhile experiment to see what they might look like as monochrome images. Which turned out to be more interesting than I had anticipated. I was not surprised by the way they were transformed into exercises in subtle tonality, but I was impressed by the way the mood of the things changed from slightly gaudy fairground scenarios to something much quieter, which also seemed to be more receptive to an interpretive gaze. Colour seems to resist participative viewing much more. It doesn't suit them all (there are about a dozen in the series so far) but I very much like those that it does.

As you might expect, the abstraction of colour also imposes a strong sense of unity, and has the effect of making the whole thing look drawn, rather than constructed. This has always been the strong point of black & white photography, of course: your attention is directed to tone, texture, and composition, without the distraction of any eye-grabbing colours that happen to fall within the frame. Originally this was a case of making a virtue of necessity, but – once the use of monochrome had become a choice, rather than the only game in town – it became a challenge to exploit to the full the expressive virtues inherent in the medium. As Orson Welles is said to have said, the enemy of art is the absence of limitations. Even so, hardly anybody chooses to make monochrome artwork, unless they enjoy working with a technology that demands it. Have you seen Sarah Gillespie's amazing mezzotint prints of moths, for example?

Back in the far-off days when colour printing was impossible or prohibitively expensive, many art books contained monochrome reproductions of paintings, often captioned "original in colour". A curious statement, really, but perhaps an indication of quite how few actual paintings people ever got to see. Ah, so it's actually a coloured painting! Thanks for letting me know... After all, for a very long time the only reproductions anyone saw or had framed in their house were more-or-less faithful engravings a fraction of the size of the real thing. Even as someone born as late as the 1950s I can still remember being shocked by the size and colourful impact of paintings when seen "live" that I thought I knew well from postcards, magazines, or those glossy black "World of Art" paperbacks from Thames & Hudson that filled a carousel in most bookshops.

It's hard to recapture, now, the sort of imaginative effort required – often, I expect, completely off the mark – to mentally colourise a grisaille version of a painting by an "old master" like Titian, never mind a Van Gogh or a Picasso. Similarly, it is almost impossible to think of classical sculpture and architecture as the highly-coloured affairs the archaeological evidence now shows them to have been. Their subtle monochrome modelling has for so long seemed their primary virtue that the thought of the Parthenon frieze as a kind of brash advertising hoarding still seems heretical.

But monochrome definitely has its own quiet virtues and, like the brainwork done to conjure up the characters and scenes set out in cold print in a novel (such a different activity to the spoon-fed visual dictation of a movie), you have to wonder whether some useful, pleasurable, and in some ways superior imaginative benefit might be derived from regularly flexing that particular set of mental muscles.

Quite possibly; but there is still no way I am going to retrieve our ancient black & white portable TV from the shed. Not least because "portable" is such a relative concept: it's an instructive thought, that that "compact" contraption's bulky and incredibly heavy CRT back-end – deeper than the front is wide – powers a screen not much different in size to my iPad, a device on which a monochrome image is a thing of subtly-toned delight, quite unlike the low-resolution, interference-spattered TV image that seemed perfectly acceptable just thirty years ago. Unlike engraving or mezzotint, some old reproductive technologies are unlikely ever to see a revival on aesthetic grounds.

Diana: Selfie with Actaeon