Saturday, May 10, 2008

Color

Color is important to me. After a lot of writing, planting seeds in a yet-to-be garden, watching a snowy sky and bare trees for a good part of the year, I want color. Something in me craves it.

I think about making collages: all the squares and rounds of colored paper, images of moons and mountains and ocean waves, huge hibiscus and roses, and faces lined like their landscapes.

I think about how to mix and match, creating an image for the eye, for the psyche underneath, all of that. What can speak to the conscious and unconscious, present and possible yearnings, I wonder.

Then my mind goes to small squares of fabric and quilting. It’s not art quilts I’m drawn to make as sewing isn’t a large part of my activities. It’s a newborn granddaughter of a close friend. And it satisfies my need for color, for drinking in the images and hues.

It’s a Sunday morning. The warmer climate outside my door calls to me, yet I take a moment to place squares I unearthed from a closet last night before bed, carefully selecting images a very young one might like to gaze at, into a pattern. Whether this quilt will cover her while she sleeps in her own crib or family bed, or whether she’ll lie upon it on the floor, gazing down at the pictures that will become a familiar part of her day, I can’t know.

So putting the squares out, lining them up with some eye to movement, I select a patch of cut watermelon slices near a stocking-cap man-in-the-moon. Nearby birds, stars, and butterflies are ready for flight. Some fish, tiny pink flowers and a square of white ducks on a lavender background vie with sunflowers, pears and pansies. One square of a Hawaiian sunset with a palm tree in the foreground marks the biannual travel of her grandmother’s favorite vacation site.

I plan to border it with pinks, magentas and blue-greens, and maybe some lavender.

Here, I’m just at the beginning stages before the stitching begins. In my garden, waiting patiently outside, it’s the same thing. The seeds have been planned, plotted, and planted. Now I need to tend to weeks, moon phases and additional plantings, and then the color will come, flower by flower, square of earth by square of garden.

Who knew, years before my fifties, that color was such an important food for me. It just seemed to burst out one day through my collages and shrines I was making at the time.

I dream sometimes of picking up a paintbrush and just stroking colors across a blank space. For some people, blank spaces intimidate them, whether page, canvas or mind screen.

For me it’s an invitation to bring my thoughts, words, or brush maybe, to the table and just see what happens. And then drink it in. Jyoti

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