"A nomad I will remain for life, in love with distant and uncharted places." -Isabelle Eberhardt
"A nomad I will remain for life, in love with distant and uncharted places." -Isabelle Eberhardt
Color theory in the most rambling way...
Summertime and the few weekends I drive from Minnesota back to Bismarck, I am so taken with the colors of the North Dakota prairie. I cannot get over the colorful, gorgeous landscape. Lush greens, mint, vibrant yellow and pale lavender. Grasses that turn red by September butted against those lush greens, in the ditches and in the fields. Don’t get me started on the sunflower fields.
I had never considered North Dakota to be a beautiful state. I do now. Beautiful in a way previously unknown to me, a landscape I'd grown unused to. The vibrant colors have me gawking out the car window, talking myself out of stopping to try to capture the image with my iPhone. The phone camera will never do the actual landscape justice.
I decide to paint the living room, dining room and kitchen of my new home in these greens. I want to surround myself with these colors all year long, especially in the middle of winter when the landscape turns dirty white with the snow that won’t leave. I want accents the color of the prairie wildflowers: lavender, ruby, scarlet, goldenrod, periwinkle.
But now, I am spending too much time surrounded by blue. I am minorly obsessed with Maggie Nelson’s book Bluets, a sort of love letter to the color blue, reading and rereading, making notes as I go and submersing myself in the language of blue.
I visit Greece. When we think of Greece, we think of blue. All of us. We all do. I do and you do too. The rooftops of Santorini, the view of the ocean and sky, the flag. Blue, blue, blue.
I get an album in the mail from my vinyl subscription service, Her Favorite Colour by Blu. A new Greek friend sends me a movie recommendation, The Big Blue, about divers in the ocean. The biggest, bluest thing there is. Blue is everywhere, all around me.
I’ve always been a blue person. I don’t own one piece of green clothing. I know because I always get myself into trouble on St. Patrick’s Day.
As the time to buy paint approaches, I find myself panicking. Can I surround myself in green? What will it do to me? Who will I become?
Green is the color of envy and jealousy, the color of greed.
Picasso had a Blue Period. Yves Klein patented his own shade of aquamarine, International Klein Blue, IKB 79. No one had a Green Period.
In Bluets Maggie Nelson says of the color green, “Stop working against the world, I counseled myself. Love the one you’re with. Love the color green. But I did not love the color green, nor did I want to have to love it or pretend to love it. The most I can say is that I abided by it.”
I cannot commit to green, not yet. But I buy sample cans of paint from the Natural Wonder series with names like Privilege Green and Liveable Green. These are encouraging names if nothing else. I find the little dollop of paint on the top of the can soothing. It feels more alive to me than the paper color sample.
So. I will not commit to the color green, not yet. But I will paint small squares on my walls. I will see if it is indeed Liveable Green. Maybe there is hope for my green life yet.
