A short rabbithole into alpine botany

There is a particular yellow on the Saxifraga oppositifolia of the eastern Bernese Oberland that I now believe explains the way I painted skies in 1997. Bear with me.

The plant is a cushion-former, six to eight centimetres tall, growing on dolomitic scree at altitudes where weather is not a season but a daily event. The flowers are usually written down as "purple" — they are, mostly — but the throat of the flower carries a yellow that has no equivalent on a screen, and which I am told is structural rather than pigmented. The light scatters off chitin-like crystals at angles you can't paint, only reproduce.

I painted skies the year I was nineteen, in oil, in a cellar in Bern with one window. The skies were yellow on the bottom and purple on top and I was told repeatedly, by people whose paintings I respected, that this was not what skies looked like. They were correct. They were also describing a different distribution of pigment.

The yellow at the bottom of those skies is the yellow at the bottom of Saxifraga oppositifolia. I had not seen the plant yet. I think I was painting it from memory, in the way that you sometimes paint a face from memory before you have met it.

That is all. There is no further conclusion. Some rabbit holes do not close into anything; they just lead somewhere quieter.