I do it every year: retool some part of my house—a wall from which I jettison current pictures and replace them with something more striking, more colorful. Or trade one set of tchotchkes on a particular shelf for brighter ones—often thrift store finds. And this year I went whole hog. My bedroom/office now sports four new loud, primary-color pieces that dance into my line of sight from the computer and my bed. Replacing predecessors that weren’t muted or bland themselves!
I crave color.
Most winters, this hunger for brilliance, for intensity strikes when our days are at their grimmest, shortest, snowiest. The timing matches this year, but we’ve been treated to a warm, open winter. Somehow March arrived on January 1. I’m not complaining. Still, my instinct for color has run unabated.
I’ve even changed my black purse for a flowered pink one. And traded in my gray loveseat for a plushy, wine-red one. Added another blue vase of orange and red and yellow silk flowers. Shrouded my bed with a kantha quilt of brilliant sari squares. Fluffed up bouquets of Mexican paper flowers.
Is it a sign of aging? A defiant ache to drink in the world in all its glory while I can? Is it a function of my macular degeneration—which, though stabilized now–lurks in my eyes? Does India still resonate in my soul?
I grew up with my mother’s consciousness of color. In 1952, she draped our living room windows with flat-out gaudy bursts of green leaves and red birds-of-paradise blossoms. When my sister and I shopped with her at J. C. Penney’s for new dress material, Mother taught us to choose coloring that flattered our hair and skin–long before color-analysis was fashionable. As a young adult, Mother painted and though her canvases weren’t as bold as my current passion—they were deep-hued. While Kansas skies have never rivaled Montana’s for depth and intensity, they were still gorgeous—especially as they framed our gold, wind-blown wheat fields. Though when I moved to Montana from Washington D.C., it was as though I’d had cataracts removed from my vision—as if curtain sheers had been pulled aside to see into this state’s brilliance. Mother never missed an opportunity to draw our eyes to that kind of free-for-the-taking beauty. I delight in the ways my daughters and grandchildren carry on that tradition.
This January, by pure serendipity, I stumbled onto a book entitled “The Secret Lives of Color” by Kassia St. Clair. If I loved color “blindly” before, I’m now even more enchanted, stunned by the history and trajectory of color in human life.
Truth be told, I just assumed that artists across time had found it easy to mix a bit of this and that to arrive at what they applied to a canvas or plaster. That on any given day of creativity, they had access to a palette something like the racks of Sherwin-William paint chips. Obviously, I hadn’t given the matter much thought.
Shade-by-shade, St. Clair recounts the origins of colors we use—all of which “burst” on the scene only after decades of experimentation, chance findings in particular rocks or crops, weeks of distillation, the application of really stinky substances, the availability of certain trade routes. The range of colors we now take for granted is a pure miracle of ingenuity and desire and cash. In fact, the very artistic masters we worship were forever strapped to buy the elusive compounds that they wanted and needed. Now I’m ruminating on the unsung heroes who pulverized stone or ground down leaves in the long, uneven searches for a color that existed in a flower or a fish or a bird or the rainbow but had yet to be available for an artist.
And St. Clair is also teaching me which colors appealed to particular cultures and causes at particular times. Red-coats, for instance, found it easy to spot other soldiers in their own ranks, but so did opposing armies. Mourning often required black and then white. And red and blood and power and sex have been intertwined across time. Even when it took 70,000 miniscule dried dactylopius coccus (insects) to make a pound of cochineal dye.
I have a long history of shying away from rainy climates. From low skies and incessant gray. I was never going to live on the windward side of any mountain range—as in Oregon’s Cascades or Montana’s Rockies. And were Montana summers not so glorious (mostly–when we don’t have forest fire smoke), I might have tried to escape our traditionally dark and icy winters. So maybe my passion for color has just grown over time—with my age and with the time I now have in retirement to feather my nest more and more to my fancy.
In fact, along with decorating decisions steeped in color, I’ve started a little simplistic daily practice: writing what amounts to small journal entries and then foraging through my collection of cast-off art and nature books and magazines for the day’s picture. And rubber cementing it to the printed entry. One more way to contemplate color and beauty in these dark times.
In truth, color is a work horse of a word. In English, at least, we employ it in dozens of ways—all of which still return to the impressions of pigments. In fact, pigments that have power and verve: your argument colored my view; let’s color in the missing pieces; now you’re showing your true colors; the honor guard presented its colors at the start of the ceremony; the menu was part of the town’s local color; he told a colorful tale; Ethel was the coloratura in the array of soloists.
Unfortunately, we’ve added other contexts, other values to the word—that tarnish its very iridescence. The disrespectful label of “coloreds.” And impugning the spectrum of colors in a rainbow. I can tolerate neither.
I am a child mostly of the 1950s when I came to consciousness. The decade that saw Brown v. Board of Education launch rocky years of school desegregation. I have no memory of my parents ever denigrating a person for their color or background. Remember that first doll my mother gave me—a little black baby she’d made on a loom. We hosted a 4-H exchange student from Honduras and remained in touch with her for many years. And watched slide show after slide show from church members returned from missions in Africa. A faithful Sunday School attendee throughout, I grew up singing:
Jesus loves the little children
All the children of the world
Red, brown, yellow, black and white
They are precious in His sight
Jesus loves the little children of the world.
So, for me, the rainbow (even as shades have been added) stands for ALL people whatever their romantic or sexual preference, whatever their skin color. For me, it radiates joy and vigor AND celebrates all humans. Colors, if more controversial now in that prismed arc, are children of the sun and crucial to life. In fact, I love that that banner of brightest colors has come full circle in symbolism and power—having begun as the original palette for humanity’s artistry. ©
