I keep forgetting to bring the camera to work. Up to my elbows in color, which requires a particular degree of patience. Water-based oils, rubbed onto sandblasted glass. Colors blended together at the edges, colors becoming one another, becoming to one another, becoming each other. Becoming something else, at times, too. (And yes, I wear gloves.)
Yesterday after work I looked at what I was wearing and saw my colors from the day: cadet blue, sap green, chocolate brown, pane's grey. Trying to keep it neutral but the brights always rally at the back of my brain to Let! Us! In!
So I give in to fuschia or orange or yellow, and then must pull the intensity back down with grey or green or blue or brown. Or purple, which never fails to astound me. Purple! This color-thing does not come naturally to me. I've been for many years a word-handler, not a color-handler. But this workout for the brain feels like weight-lifting, and I grow more adept by the day. At least I think I do...there are days at a time when color fails me, abandons me gasping and confused. What is blue? What is red? What is every shade & hue in-between? I want to know. I want a definition for blue. I want to write it: a 25-line poem, internal rhyme, alliteration, onomatopoeia, etc., and all that cannot possibly be said and yet, indeed, said about blue.
In ancient Rome, purple was the preferred color on patrician togas because it was expensive and difficult to make.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was at college, we had a colour called 'bench-end'. this was made by taking each day's palette-scrapings, and combining them at the end of the week/month/year. It created a nasty grey/brown that could be used for underpainting.
ReplyDeleteHappy colouring. Cro.