Osman Hamdi Bey: When Color Becomes Knowledge and Vision

On a morning recorded in no calendar, Osman Hamdi Bey is summoned before a white canvas that accuses him of looking at the world without seeing it, and when he protests that he has spent his life observing faces, domes, doors, tiles and light, it asks whether he has seen what they conceal. Through a door painted on its whiteness he enters a museum without end, hung with paintings he has not yet made: a scholar whose empty book shows its words only when he closes his eyes, a woman in a chamber of blue tiles whose shadow is centuries older than she is, and an old man with a flute waiting for tortoises that will not move. The man says he was appointed to change what refuses to change, and the artist sees that the man bears his own face and that the tortoises, drawn from his celebrated painting The Tortoise Trainer, are ancient ideas afraid to leave the homes on their backs. As brown brings out time, blue silence and gold light, his hand and then his voice vanish, until only an observing eye and a moving brush remain and the canvas asks who is painting whom. Color becomes a document and the brush a key, and the book closes as an oil painting workshop that asks who will return home: the person who entered, or the human being the colors have painted anew.