Stay of Execution: Volume Color

Housemate has started up again at art school, and one of her classes this semester is called "Form and Color in Space." For an assignment this week she's taking pictures of different kinds of color. The three kinds of color are surface color, film color, and volume color. Surface color is fairly obvious -- the color of an object as you look at it. Trickier are volume color and film color. Film color is apparently an edgeless kind of color -- the color of the sky, or the translucency of light shining through something, a shadow, or reflection on a surface. Volume color is the effect of a gas or liquid in a container -- so, perhaps, orange juice in a glass. Or a cloud, we think. On our walk yesterday (both of us have, reluctantly, given up running, at least for now) we looked at the trees and the water and the reflections and the sky and the seagrass, all textured and green and yellowy-red, and discussed the attributes of the color. The morning light was hazy and a little thick and across the cove the city buildings were hazier than usual. Is that volume color, the fact of the intervening vague indistinct mist, the slight faded blurring over distance? Maybe that's just the surface color? Can you describe a lack of crispness as a color at all? But the trees in the foreground were clear and in focus; by comparison the pastel softness of the city across the water made it clear that there was light mist in between, even though you couldn't see the mist itself, just the way it softened the buildings. Is that volume color?

We walked past a smallish tidepool on which an egret, some birds that looked like curlews, and a few ducks were fishing. The water was flat silver, a reflection of the sky, except here and there where you'd see a sprinkling of rings appearing at the surface where a flicker of minnows would appear, and where the birds would run and chase the minnows. We stopped and watched the birds, hunting more actively than you usually see, and in an unusual display of interspecies togetherness. The periodic rippling punctuating the surface of the tidepool made it clear that it was a liquid, but the color you saw on the surface was reflected sky -- film color or volume color? We kept stopping and looking at things, trying to describe to one another the way a color was manifesting itself. I wondered about the seagrass -- its green an obvious textured mix of separate blades, each a flat green fading at the top to a yellow, a red, or a golden brown. Looking across the marsh at a patch of shore you got not just a splash of surface colors, but a sense of texture and volume from the aggregation and the feathery groupings of all these separate colors and their shadows. How do you describe that, the way the color of a patch of grass is distinct and different than the color of any individual blade of grass, the way the variation of colors can convey texture and volume and shape?

It's funny how a new set of vocabulary words can open your eyes to the world in a whole new way.