Color

I have a window fan in my bathroom. It's new. I liked the polished white finish of its hard plastic. The sun hit it this morning and I learned it isn't white in full light. It's pink! This experience has prompted this random reflection on color.

I often think about color. I draw and used to paint. I play with color in my home environment. I toy with color when making my illustrations for this blog.

When I look at a clear night sky, I realize that color is really about light, not about pigments or dyes. The vast areas of unlit Universe are black to my human eye. The stars are twinkling prisms of white light being refracted by the atmosphere as it reaches me. 

Everything in a totally dark room looks the same. As light is added, brighter and brighter, colors emerge and change. My perception is what changes. Shedding light on a subject allows its colors and nuances to come into my consciousness. 

I remember how tortured I could become when I was painting regularly with acrylics or oils. The harder I tried to control the colors on my palette, the crazier I became. Slowly I learned the wisdom of accepting happy accidents. My blood pressure and my work improved.

As a humanist and an inquisitively scientific person, I am aware of color when encountering a face that interests me on the subway or in a social context. I am fascinated by colors of human skin that range from the deepest black to freckled pink. I wonder at the pigments and their variation in light. I look at profiles and imagine them in silhouette without any color. 

The joy of color is diminished by its manipulation by those who would use it for power or superiority. Albert Speer's stunning graphic color sense becomes emblematic of true evil. Media portrayals of dark skinned people in early America were used to justify slavery. The perversion of the joy in and fascination with our own colors deprives us of a special form of self-appreciation and validation. It causes many of us to distance ourselves a step further from our bodies, our true selves.

When I worked in acute psychiatric services in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a fair amount of experimentation with the psychological and behavioral effects of environmental color on human beings. Pink was seen as soothing. Blue and gray as depressing. Red as agitating or stimulating. Some hospitals claimed positive results from applying these color theories. 

I have recently become a fan of the new full-spectrum efficient light bulbs. I placed four of these in a dingy bathroom of an old house I was recently cleaning. Suddenly colors and grime appeared that I had not seen before. The colors were beautiful, more beautiful than I had ever noticed in the fifty-seven years of my familiarity with that room. The grime was more easily removed.

My practice is often like turning a bright light on my own life. Nuances of emotion, like shades of color, become more pronounced when illuminated by bringing them into the light of my conscious examination. Making decisions is so much easier when all the components are clear, like colors on a brightly lit palette. And, as with painting, mixing the colors to come to a final decision brings both happy and unhappy accidents. But, the beauty of practice is using the mindful appreciation of these accidents to color future experiences for the better. Keeping the light and the colors bright is the function of practice.