Musings On Color |

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Musings On Color

It was so simple to have those racist “flesh” colored crayons guiding me to scribble in a peach-like tone to poorly drawn stick figure faces. When you’re young, things are assigned colors — generalizations about what something is supposed to be. An apple is red. A banana is yellow. An orange is… well.

With age, you learn that apples are also green.

An apple can be red or green.

Well, then you learn they can be yellow… just like bananas.

An apple can be red, green, or yello— well they can also be greenish-yellow, reddish-yellow, a medley of colors, really…

But then you learn that with age they can change color as they ripen, and when you bite them, their pale yellowey-white insides can bleed brown in a matter of minutes. When I picked up painting in college, I realized that even all of those complexities of an apple’s color were awfully surface-level. You see, the kind of light, the color of light, the proximity of the light, the material and color of the surface it sits on, the colors and proximities of nearby objects, the wetness or waxiness of the apple, the density of the air, and the colors of the surrounding environment, can all drastically adjust how you perceive the fruit.

Yet even if you take the reddest, most “pure” apple and isolate it away from all of these extraneous factors, you still can’t simply label it as “red”: Crimson, Cadmium, Pyrrole, Alizarin, Rose, Quinacridone, Venetian, and everything in between.

Apples to Apples, my ass.