Colored Swatches

I don't know if I've mentioned that Housemate is a part-time art student (and a part-time nurse practitioner). Anyway there are always crazy projects around the house: cardboard sculptures, plaster molds, sketches, black and white bloopy forms. Last semester for a class we called "dots and bars" she always was cutting out black and white circles or triangles at the kitchen counter, arranging them into patterns for an assignment while we talked.

Last night we were talking about something significant that had happened to her at work (the grown-up nurse practitioner job) and she jumped up. "I've got to work on an assignment while we talk." She brought in a stack of a couple of dozen painted squares in colors ranging between yellow and purple. The assignment was to create a line of nine squares going in even steps from a pure bright yellow to a dark bold purple. So there were yellow greens and muddy green-blues and blue-purples and everything in between. We talked as she laid them out and then started moving the colors around. We were having a fairly serious discussion about the resolution of a longstanding work problem. But pretty soon we weren't talking any more as she moved these paint chips around. You couldn't really do both, you got absorbed by the colors. And when she had the nine squares one was in the wrong place, I thought. I was trying to tell her. "No, that one, no, over, more in the middle, yeah, it's too, well, no, it's too close, it's not the right step, how about that one, unh uh, the other, nope, the, over there." We were both rendered totally inarticulate by the project, which was very simple. But even though you know when you look at three colors that the difference between the one on the left and the one in the middle is not as big as the difference between the one in the middle and the one on the right, there isn't a word to describe what that difference is. And the colors themselves, except for the yellow and purple on the ends, didn't have names -- they were all greeny-yellow or muddy browngreenpurple. Speech, at least my speech, didn't help at all. My eyes and my gut and my pointing index finger were the best tools I had.

I feel sort of like I'm working on a project like that in my own life, something compelling like arranging these squares, but one that I don't have the vocabulary to describe at all, one that sort of takes place away from the part of my brain that uses language. That sounds very mysterious and I don't mean it like that. I just mean there are things we have words for and things we don't, or at least I don't.

Comments

[David Giacalone]

I wonder how/if humans were able to have any kind of clear thoughts on a complex subject before there were words for the concepts under consideration? I think it was George Will who once wrote "It you can't say it clearly, you can't think it clearly." [makes one worry about certain Commanders In Chief)

Note however, that when there's money to be made, the words are found: (1) paint manufacturers; (2) psychologists; (3) lawyers. Sometimes, of course, the words just muddy things up.

[Christine]

What a great analogy for life. The opposite colors representing birth and death and the rest all of the events that intermingle and create the person that we are at each step. OK, now I feel badly about mocking abstract art. Your description of the process gave me a bit of insight into how an abstraction can represent something more meaningful than the thing itself. I am usually pretty daft when it comes to interpretation. I feel all intellectual now... somebody get me a half-caf skim latte. :)