A Touch of Color

IndiBlogger has another writing contest sponsored by Hewlett Packard! 

Why must somethings always be Black & White?

Tell us what you would like to see in glorious color - be it an old movie, famous portrait, family photograph or anything that you can imagine. You can also tell us why you chose those colors for your blog's template, and how it represents you as a brand. It's time to think in color!

Ho, Ho, Ho!! (rubbing my hands with glee!). Isn’t this the perfect contest for me!!!

Of the several silly arguments that bounce back and forth between me and my husband, the most common is on colors - yeah, that’s how “profound” we are. His favorite colors are black, white, and occasionally, gray. And mine is the entire rainbow! From home “decoration”/accessorizing to apparel shopping to the kinds of flowers to plant in the garden, it’s an eternal debate. I can’t wrap my head around his aversion to colors!

I love colors, and am grateful every single day for the blessing of vision to be able to appreciate and adore them. I love the creamy, syrupy, cute little bottles and capsules of paint, get mesmerized by their sparkle, their luscious aura, the million different ways in which their molecules reflect light; I admire their gooey loveliness, the thrill of mixing, swirling, and gliding one hue over another to create a different shade, and reach a high on splashing them across paper, canvas, metal, wood, cement, concrete, glass, mirror, ceramic, fabric... pretty much anything. I can confidently say that I have dabbled in all sorts of painting - though I am not good at any! I have ardently wanted to take up formal painting lessons, but have managed to never get around to it.

My childhood home is littered with my limitless experiments with “colors” and “deft” strokes. I haven’t spared cupboards, walls, doors, the fridge, the few spaces around the TV screen, and even the back of the bed frame. They may just be covered with trite replicas of flowers, birds, vines, and symmetric patterns (all in multicolored versions), but the point is, I don’t let anything remain plain and bare. Everything needs to contain vibrant (or even muted) colors. Every time I glance upon our milky-white mantle, I envision painting a looping grapevine hugging around it, masking the white with greens and violets. BUT, I am forbidden. I look at a plain wall and rush to put something on it to give it a splurge of color. I see another bare wall, and crave to do a mural, except I don’t know how to. I stare at the plain white T-shirt I was gifted by you-know-who, and have to fight the urge to hunt for fabric colors. I fill out forms and feel saddened to write down boring “black” to both my eye and hair color. If only I could color my own eyes, my hair, the walls, the various other artifacts I come across in my life, with just a touch, or a thought!

So my wish is this - I want to have the ability to have the “touch of color”, like Midas did with his “golden touch”. Midas’s story was both fascinating and morbid to me. I loved the power he held - to touch things and change them to his liking, but the whole episode with his daughter was unpleasant. My wish is hopefully not out of greed - it is out of the lust for visual stimulation (through colors), and to add merriment all around me. I wish I could touch things and change their color/s, any number of times I want.

I want to touch my eyes and alternate between the umpteen subtle shades of blue, green, brown, and violet eyes (no matter how scary and vampire-y I look). I want to touch walls and change their colors every few weeks, touch fabrics and infuse the most lovely colors into them, occasionally grace daisies and change their whites to peppy shades, wave at the sky and sprinkle yellows into the clouds... almost like living within my own version of Photoshop! The world will literally be my canvas! How exciting is that?!

Now, here is my spiel that acknowledges the ethical concerns. I realize that colors are subjective and personal - so let my “power” not extend to changing people’s body colors (I won’t make people look like they landed from Pandora), let my changes and experiments not be visible to others (so they can’t complain if I touch their sofa and change it to a garish pink). So by restricting my changes to be visible just to my eyes, I conform to the whole issue of respecting others’ choices, and not forcing my whimsies onto them. I will also not confuse the bees and insects, and mess up the ecosystem by covering flowers, leaves, and fruits in strange tints.

So that is my silly wish. Regarding the colors on my blog template, I chose them because they looked appealing! Nothing deeply intellectual. I realize that I mostly gravitate towards images with trees or falling leaves - not sure why, but I can come up with something interesting... like, trees represent robustness, the falling leaves represent the constant change of seasons, thoughts, feelings, etc. I like to think of myself as a tree that constantly weathers the various changes that take place around it, and grow and mature in the process. The pastel shades convey soothing, mellow feelings... they also tend to get dull, pale and uninteresting. The dim colors also represent the many abstract and feeble thoughts floating in my mind. Unless I give vent to them to take on full blown livid colors, they keep losing their pallor and eventually just dissolve into a corner. I like blues for their serenity and tranquility - I would like to always reach this state of calmness even after experiencing turbulence of the mind. I love soft, pale greens for the warmth and cheer they exude. They also remind me of the fresh new start of spring. Again, my aim to is to get back to a state of warmth, cheer, and begin afresh after bursts of dreary, frigid winters.

So there, a whole post dedicated to colors! Despite having come across as a raging color maniac, I do appreciate the simplicity of whites, the boldness of black, and the neutrality of grays. Every color appeals to a specific aesthetic sense, and that is the reason for their absolute beauty.