Choosing a Wall Color? These Experts’ Feelings Are Neutral

I spent days deciding what color to paint the walls of our living room. I held paint chips up to the light and against the wall and near the sofa. I debated with my husband the relative merits of various hues. I argued about this shade and that.

I chose white.

The walls are what the paint manufacturer calls “oyster” white. The ceiling? “Shell.” I considered but rejected “dove,” “ivory,” “milk,” “stone” and “moon” whites. I was tempted by “bone,” but it seemed macabre. I liked “china” white by the light of the moon, but not the morning after. “Design-studio” just wasn’t me.

A friend in the midst of redecorating a house came for dinner not long ago and fell in love with our whites. Could she copy them, she asked somewhat sheepishly. Would we mind?

I’d be flattered, I answered. Soon after that I was approached by a neighbor who wondered if she could look at our walls. She was redecorating, she explained, and she’d heard about our whites.

Who would have guessed that white could be so complex, so demanding? On the surface, it seems innocent, virginal, pure as the driven snow. But it arrives weighed down with baggage and fraught with meaning. Think white supremacy. Brides. Communion hosts. Angel wings. Clerical collars. In some cultures, white is a symbol of joy or spirituality. In others it is a sign of mourning. White hats are good guys, white knights may carry you off on their horses and the White Sox are going nowhere soon. What about White Russians? Or the Beatles’ “White” album, white elephant, white sale, white noise?

Glen Bossard, assistant manager at the Stebbins Anderson store in Towson, Md., knows the nuances of white through his experience with paint. “People come in and say, ‘Oh, we’d just like a nice off-white.’ I say: ‘I’ve got about a hundred.’”

From the paint manufacturer Benjamin Moore’s line of ready-mixed interior paints, Bossard can offer you “antique,” “bone,” “simply,” “timid,” “linen,” “winter,” “mirage,” “china,” “dove,” “cameo,” “moonstone,” “atrium” or “Navajo” white.

“The ultimate test is to take a quart of paint home and paint your wall,” Bossard says. “I’ve had people go through five or six cans of off-white. I’ve had people spend months on white. I’ve had people who just can’t make up their minds about white. All they can say is, ‘This just doesn’t look right.’”

In the contemporary art world, curators swear by the notion of the “white cube.” The less visual interference between viewer and art, they argue, the better. The more abstract the art, the more important it is to have a neutral background.

That explains why so many contemporary art galleries sport all-white walls and neutral ceilings and floors. It does not explain why Baltimore Museum of Art curator Helen Molesworth has spent hours in recent weeks trying to decide what color white to paint the galleries before installing her contemporary art exhibition.

“All whites are different, and all spaces need different whites,” Molesworth says. Lighting, too, plays a role. “White is vexing.”

Last year, to prepare for “Body- space,” a show of art informed by minimalism, Molesworth examined pages of paint samples. She thought about the kind of art included in the show. She considered the size and shape of the galleries. She considered the lighting. She eliminated dozens of whites until she chose “country-stove white.”

This year, to prepare for an exhibit titled “Looking Forward/Looking Black,” an examination of racial and gender stereotypes in America that opens Feb. 6, she simplified her technique.

She chose the white wall labels she wanted to use, took them to a paint manufacturer and said: “Match this, please.”

White isn’t really a color but the combination of them all. “The color that we see is determined by wavelengths of light hitting an object, some being absorbed and some being reflected. When all the wavelengths are absorbed, the surface appears black; when all are reflected, we see white,” said Catherine Behrent, a professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Therein lies the beauty and intrigue of white. It can be as dull as chalk and as reflective as snow; as warm as a mother’s milk and as icy as an avalanche. In Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick,” a white whale is Captain Ahab’s obsession. In Robert Frost’s sonnet “Design,” white stands for purity and disease. In children’s storybooks, Snow White awaits her prince.

Painters long have wrestled with the problem of white. White paint, made with lead, nearly blinded 18th century still-life painter Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin. In 1749, French painter Jean-Baptiste Oudry lectured on the difficulties of painting white on white.

Oudry was known primarily as a painter of animals, says Eik Kahng, associate curator of 18th and 19th century European art at the Walters Art Museum. In “The White Duck,” he depicts a duck lying against a crumpled white tablecloth with a white jar and a white candlestick. The 1753 work is considered a masterpiece in which the artist conquers the problem of painting white on white.

“Oudry is a great painter,” Kahng says, adding, “you can’t do a better duck.”

In 1918, avant-garde painter Kasimir Malevich produced a series of “White on White” paintings. He was grappling with the demands of a post-revolutionary world, Molesworth says. “There was a sense of extraordinary possibilities and that the old way of making paintings wasn’t in keeping with the revolution. There was a desire to make a new, pure, clean, transcendent image for the utterly new, modern world.”

Since then, many artists, including Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman and Robert Erwin, have created paintings or installations that explore white or nearly all white. French playwright Yasmina Reza in 1998 wrote “Art,” a play about the evolution of a friendship between three men after one buys an all-white painting.

Not all artists are inspired by white, of course. One, a painter and professor of art at Hollins University in Roanoke, Va., remains entirely unconvinced of its merits.

“I’ve never understood the fascination. I rarely use white in my painting, rarely straight from the tube. I use color to suggest white, glowing colors and halftones and shadows,” he says. “And my wife and I agonized over our living room walls. We finally settled on a beautiful color, a chameleon color: gray. Much better than white.”

Who is this man? Professor Bill White, of course.

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Holly Selby writes for the Baltimore Sun, a Tribune company.