MONOCHROME

One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.

Virginia Woolf

As the grey and chill of winter set in, a short sequence of poems inspired by the National Gallery’s current exhibition, Monochrome: Painting in Black and White, and celebrating the drama of a world with and without colour: