Thoughts on Color

Last week, as I returned home from a month-long trip to western France, I was more than a little amused to find a welcome-back-to the-civilized-world offering from a friend. On the front seat of my car was a bag of sugary cereal, a National Enquirer, a quart of beer, and a package of Twinkies.

The cereal sack boasted, “Brighter Marshmallows!” This is not a quality I generally look for in a breakfast cereal, but it did get me thinking about the marvel of color and its impact on content.

I’m a sucker for color. My favorite color is usually all of them, unless I’m having a red day. I flip through a rack of posters and gravitate immediately to anything orange.

But in Nantes, the houses were mostly all chalky tan and grey. The sidewalks came right up to the houses, yards hidden behind tall garden walls. Occasionally, a sultry pink rose peeked over a wall, Rapunzel of the garden world.

A tiny Breton village of a dozen thatched cottages had brilliant blue doors, and red geraniums in the window boxes.

In the city, I saw both men and women wearing bright yellow pants. (No one in Flagstaff wears yellow pants. This is a frontier town, by God.) Since I generally wear colors designed to make me invisible, I felt terribly conspicuous.

At the Musée de Beaux Arts in Nantes, I reveled in a room full of gigantic, abstract, intensely-colored canvases by painter Joan Mitchell, all that indulgent color swallowing me whole.

Surprisingly, though, some of my favorite artworks on this trip were subtly colored, or completely neutral—a set of of elegantly drawn etchings of the Breton countryside, sumptuous charcoal studies for al fresco paintings on chapel ceilings, and sensual, oversize figures in marble and stone. What struck me about these pieces were the details: beautiful feet with impossibly long toes, the curve of a full hip, the line of a draped figure.

All this reminds me to to look beyond the obvious, beyond my immediate response, to get to the essence of the thing, which sometimes has nothing to do with color. Brighter marshmallows notwithstanding.

This writing appeared in Flagstaff Live! on July 24, 1999.