Chasing Color

 

Color seems like a simple thing, right? A color is a color. Kids know what blue is.  Blue is always blue. There's something very concrete about color. Until it isn't. 

As a little kid I learned that color is complex. First through paint, mixed with my fingers, where yellow and green made mucky brown. Then Playdoh taught me that yellow and blue didn't make green... but more of a vomit color. This was not looking good for my little color wheel. (I went looking for photos on the intertubes that would illustrate my childhood frustration, but apparently Playdoh has changed to remedy that frustration, so that now the colors do blend together according to the color wheel... but they sure didn't in the 1970's. Also of note in my search were the number of sites which offered homemade versions of Playdoh because apparently that's a thing.)

At the same time, I was trying to understand how light changed color. My mom found these educational toys at a garage sale one weekend. Transparent colored geometric forms that could fit one inside the other to explain complex geometry. I am sure as far as the "educational toy" part was concerned, it was supposed to make me smarter. If I had to guess, that was probably where I began to fail geometry and calculus. I was probably seven or eight. What I learned however is that light passing through these translucent shapes gave a very pure color. Overlapping color matched what I imagined. Yellow X Red = Orange(ish). The color wheel started turning.  (Tried searching the Googleplex to find this ancient geometry toy/tool, and found bupkis. I guess if it happened before 2000, that shit just isn't on da Googlebot's radar.)

The older I became, the more I wanted to touch the color. I spent most of my teenage years experimenting with dyes. I started dying bamboo and other natural reeds to try to get color into the baskets I was making. When those colors failed to be lightfast, I began chasing stronger dyes. At the same time, I was taking ceramics in school... and glazes were proving to be just as frustrating. The wet glazes looked like strawberry milkshakes or pepto-bismol... but after firing might be red or blue or some god awful creation. Sometimes the color wheel got a flat tire. 

This was one of the first pots I attempted to throw in high school. Glazed with layers of glazes from the school glaze cabinet. It was so hideous when it came out that I re-glazed and refired it three times, hoping for something better.

This glaze was named 'Grapefruit Green' in the glaze book. Yeah, not so green.

Midway through high school I met a woman at a craft show who was willing to teach me how to tie dye. Anyone who went to school with me knows what happened next. I went wild! I dyed everything in sight. Shirts, socks, underwear, you name it! Our backyard became a dye factory. The whole family became involved as it pushed/pulled me into other businesses. We destroyed washing machines due to the soluble salts coming off the dyestuffs. We would stomp on the garments outside, on the concrete patio, to press the excess dye out before we rinsed and washed everything. That patio was dyed every imaginable color. Our feet were blue-purple-green-black in ways that would scare emergency room doctors...but for us was just another day. 

tie dye in our backyard

I'll skip how things went from tie dye to clay and the more than twenty years of time that passed in that pursuit.... mostly because in some ways, that is a far more interesting story that deserves an affectionate retelling.

What made me bring up all this old stuff about color? Well, at the end of the day, color is a perception. Not much different from taste. We all perceive it differently. Color is perceived relative to the light that is in the space. "True" color doesn't really exist. It's all just bouncing or absorbing photons whose excited energy we perceive as color. Nevermind pigments, jump over structural color (a'la butterfly wings and feathers), never mind iridescence, skip reflected color... just stick with the idea of color. What we each call a color, that name... call it cornflower blue... is seldom agreed upon. Ask anyone at the paint counter at the hardware store. Before in-store colorimeters, you were guaranteed to have heated arguments  : "but I bought this lovely mauve for my kitchen but now it looks like puce". Of course the kitchen lighting changed the color. Everything changes the color. 

This led me to last night's images.

From inside my kitchen, I looked out the window to the absurdly cold January fading light. Yeah, up here it gets dark at 4pm in January. Not my fault. By five o'clock it is ink black. At 4pm however, it is something else entirely. Blue, blue-black, indigo, ink, the list goes on and on. My word for it can't put the perfect image into your mind. Do we have a word for glowing blue-black sky? For a photographer, this is often referred to as "the blue hour" but at least for me, that has never lasted an hour. More like ten to fifteen minutes by the time I realize it is happening. 

Trying to capture that color... that simple blue is elusive. 

The camera doesn't see blue. It actually sees grey... well, black and white. Light or no light. But when it comes to analyzing color, especially in low light, it wants everything to be middle grey... and then color is secondary.  Shooting at night is fraught with lying colors.

This is what I saw with my eyes, or as close as I was able to capture in those few fleeting moments before the sun was completely gone. It was a glowing blue.
(please pardon the artifacts from the phone processing... those glowing edges around the trees...
computers/phone really struggle with low light like this)

Which leads me back to my original question about the nature of color. How we perceive it... how much of it is real. I have sought to touch color since I was the tinest of nuggets. Through dye and flame, through photo emulsions and video sensors, I have made every effort to capture the color I see with my eyes and imagine with my inner eye. 

I feel like the transition to gardening is as much about touching the color as it is recognizing the incredibly fleeting nature of plants. Some colors just dont exist in the plant world (or at least within certain genera). When I started working with irises, I was immediately drawn to the hybridizing work of some of today's greatest creators of irises. At some point, I'd like to write about the progress of color in hybridizing to illustrate exactly how far things have come. It is phenomenal!  I'll save that topic for another post. For now, it's time to go outside and enjoy the 26° sunshine before it passes.