As an artist, I assign colors to all sort of things that don’t actually have color: emotions, thoughts, time, ideas…my inner world is very colorful, indeed. Matching color to concepts is a hallmark of many of our Drawing Meditation themes.
Love is in the air during February. It’s traditionally associated with red or pink for a variety of reasons – it’s threaded through in art and literature, everywhere at Valentine’s day, in the petals of romantic red roses and the passion of red lips. But love doesn’t have to red. Maybe your love is the green of summer grass, the tawny brown of your lover’s eyes, or the yellow-gold of a pendant.
Purple. My color of love is a rich, royal purple. It’s the color of the pantsuit that my mother let me choose for my “first day of first grade” outfit. She took me to the clothing store and told me I could have anything I wanted as a new school outfit. I fell in love with a polyester pantsuit – a dark and vivid jacket and pants ensemble. Mom was horrified or bemused or perhaps both. She wore crisp blues and earth tones. Regal purple was not in her palette and definitely not a color suitable for first graders. I am sure she tried to talk me into a beautifully smocked Polly Flinders dress, but I was not dissuaded. And because she promised and she loved me, I got that purple pantsuit.
I have to remember the color as best I can; there was a snapshot of me in the outfit, standing proudly in front of a decorative wheelbarrow in the front yard on the fist day of school, but I do not have the photo. Perhaps it is in the boxes of family pictures that live in my sister’s attic. My memory of this purple is vivid but I’d like to compare it to the faded Kodachrome.
I challenged myself to mix the color live on camera for our Facebook group, Drawing Meditations Adventures. The result is above and it’s a close approximation of my memory of the purple. You can watch the video (~8 minutes) to see my process and to hear the full story of the purple pantsuit here: https://www.facebook.com/683531868/videos/10159314822291869/