Brilliant Color, Well Arranged
The uglier, older, meaner, iller, poorer I get, the more I wish to take my revenge by doing brilliant colour, well arranged, resplendent.
Can you guess who wrote that sentence on September 14, 132 years ago? None other than the extraordinary visionary, Vincent Van Gogh.
I can relate to Vincent's feelings. Color certainly lifts me out of my doldrums. Sometimes, in the most mundane ways, it provides me with such quiet delight.
As I wrote in my last blog, COVID time is allowing me to take care of my "To Do" list tasks. On that front, there's always the mending pile heaped in some corner awaiting attention, eh? I finally turned to it recently. In the midst of seeking the appropriate colored thread, I stopped short, and thought,
Man oh man, these spools are a mess. I spend too much time hunting down the right color for each mend. WHY? Because the spools aren't organized.
Oh, wait. I'm a Color Expert AND an Organizer - why haven't I ROY G BIV'd, (ROY G BIV = Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet), my spools of thread?
Habits die hard. We get stuck in our familiar patterns and fail to see what's right in front of us. Here is what my boxes of thread looked like before I tackled them.
Below, you'll see how I sorted the spool boxes into NEUTRALS, PASTELS and JEWEL TONES. Ah, the sweet relief brought on by color harmony and organization!
There are abundant quiet color offerings from the mundane world and, as we all know, there are also resplendent color offerings. The video below of a Van Gogh exhibit that occurred in Paris a year ago is an example of color made RESPLENDENT. Viewing this spectacular, thoroughly immersive exhibit brought tears to my eyes. Thank you, dear Amanda Cushman, for clueing me into it!