Color, part one

There’s a lot to say about color. Color forms a major part of my perceptual universe. I’m not suggesting that I’m unique in this—humans are predisposed to focus on sight out of all of our sense, and color is one of the key elements of sight. If we used color in none but the most literal ways that would make it important enough, but we take it much further than that. We use color to describe and define emotion. We ask each other what our favorite colors are. We talk about colors that clash and that are complimentary. We don’t do this with tastes, smells, sounds, or textures, or at least not with the same regularity that we do with colors.

We have entire symbolic languages built up around color. Green tells us that we’re safe or that we should go (green for the trees our species grew up in, perhaps?). Red shouts danger and to stop (the color of our blood). We can be in the red, in the black, seeing red, green with envy, feeling blue, and a yellow-bellied coward. Blue hotel rooms promote restfulness. Yellow kitchens are sunny and warm. Restaurants decorate in red to make you hungry. Brothels decorate in red to make you hungry too. The grass is supposedly greener elsewhere and grey clouds are reputed to have linings of silver, which is just a different yet more desirable shade of grey.

Color is important. Color is telling. Color speaks. We see and understand the world through color.

When I was little I didn’t like the color brown. At best brown was plain and flat and boring. At worst it is ugly. I would go out of my way to avoid wearing brown. Brown was somehow rotten and unsavory. Brown was the color of mud and decay. Looking back its hard for me to remember all the reasons why I didn’t like brown. I liked things that were brown. Wood, for instance. There was just something about manmade browns. I liked blue and I liked green. I liked purple most of all. My sister had a brown dress that she wore to Carriage Hill Farm that was really ugly (in my opinion).

In grade school, at St. Joe’s, we had a very limited palette of colors we could wear. White, pale yellow, or pale blue OCBD (oxford cloth button down) shirts. Navy blue, grey, or dark brown pants. Really horrid polyester pants. Ties that matched the color and the fabric of the pants. And then there were the brown shoes. Maybe if they had been somewhat stylish, but the kind of cheap dress shoes that you get as a kid barely look good in a nice color, let alone a really ugly fake shade of brown. Interwoven with grade school and high school I had another sartorial phase that, while not strictly about color, certainly was colorful. I don’t quite remember why or how it happened, but I developed quite an obsession with Harley-Davidson motorcycles and many of the cultural and stylistic elements that went with them. This also may be why I first decided to grown my hair long, though that could also have had more Medieval roots. I had a bunch of Harley-Davidson t-shirts, which were decorated with many colorful airbrushed designs. This propensity earned me the nickname “Harley”. Eagles and flags and v-twins—oh my! The colors were so flat and so stale. Dressed in faded, barely there hues, I felt faded and barely there. I receded into the background, my coloring as dreadful as institutional paint on institutional walls beneath institutional lights. With only these choices I could not help but recoil from the idea of those plain and simple colors.

In high school my personal palette began to expand and change. (I was still attending a parochial school, so there were limitations on what I could wear.) When it came to pants I liked patterned greys sometimes, but mostly black, and in soft, billowy fabrics. For shirts it had to be the brightest and most saturated colors I could find (and billowy). Blood red, mustard yellow, forest green, sapphire blue, and plum purple. There was a certain piratical flare to the colored shirts I wore. If I could have gotten away with stripes or something else outrageous I would have, but the powers that be of Lorain Catholic HS weren’t about to let that happen. Ties were chosen for colors brighter than the shirts and the most outrageous patterns I could turn up (hello Ralph Marlin!). Flamboyant was my watch-word. It wasn’t just that, though. It wasn’t just a desire to be brightly colored for brightness sake. I think that those saturated, rich colors, were my way of speaking silently about the depth and color of my personality. By festooning my body in those kinds of shades and hues I was trying to make my outer self as stunning as I felt my inner self to be. Oh, and because it was the early ‘90s I did, in fact, own a pair of white dress slacks that I thought were pretty rad. There were also a few instances of a very, very authentic steel grey. Don’t forget the shoes. They were deepest black and forms most stylish.

At the same time I really went in for black. I could easily build a week’s worth of wardrobe all out of black, and topped with a long black trench coat. This wasn’t a goth thing, please understand. I had never heard of goth before, and if you had mentioned it to me at the time I would have wondered what Germanic barbarians had to do with anything. I donned black because it was the color of the theatrical pastime that was becoming so central to my life. Black for blending in with the back of the stage. Black for slinking out from the wings to make a set change. As I took over the technical side of my high school’s drama club my black garb became royal regalia. I was the Techie-king! Theatre wasn’t the only reason I wore black. Black was the color of outsiders and societal rejection. Check and check. Black was the color of sinister. I was sinister. Black was what badasses wore, and boy did I think I was a badass. Black was the color of the night, and during high school I came to love being in the dark (that doesn’t sound quite like I meant it to…). It may have been because theatre taught me that magic happened when the lights went out (that also didn’t sounds like I thought it would). It may have been a growing changing spirituality that included my repudiation of Christianity. Black was the banner of the choices I was making concerning what was important in my life.

As viewed through the filter of my choice of clothing colors, my perception of the universe had grown from one which was very limited and chosen for me by my parents or school, into one where I saw vibrancy and variety. I expressed my understanding of what I was seeing by wrapping myself in plumage designed to attract attention and communicate personality. Mirroring my evolving color usage in clothing was my experience of the people I knew. Going to high school outside of my home town introduced me to a more colorful group of people. Not that that’s always a positive thing. More colorful doesn’t automatically mean better, or even good. I met some absolutely awful people in high school, which probably played a role in driving me toward different and more colorful forms of self-expression.

As my world expanded from grade school to high school, and then began to approach college, I reflected and sought to match that growth. I became brighter. I became darker. I became more saturated. I became more patterned and textured. I became more flexible and more willing to try new combinations. I became richer and more varied. I also became more plaid, but that’s a story for another time.