Day 8: How I stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Entire Color Wheel

This is an embarrassing admission. I have a troubled relationship with brown (and yellow and orange and sometimes green.) These are colors I avoid as if they were wearing a leather jacket with the collar up, smoking a cigarette and trying to entice me into the alley to engage in some sort of risky behavior. I do not allow them in my pallet - not for painting (artwork or walls) nor for wearing. Oh, but I flirt with these bad boy colors entertaining daydreams of riding on the back of a motorcycle, yellow and orange scarf flying from the collar of my BLACK leather jacket.  For my own safety I steered clear of brown and yellow and orange and sometimes green. There is just no telling what they might convince me to do.

I was warned about the dangers of bad boy colors as a young woman, when my father disapproved of a green sweater I wore.* Fearing that as I aged I might become wild and out of control adorned with gold and olive, an intervention was arranged.  One evening a trained Image Consultant arrived at my home to drape my shoulders and face with capes of every color.  Her expert observations determined me to be a "Winter. Yellow, orange, gold, rust, olive, beige, golden brown and all colors with golden undertones are not for you, I was counseled.  To help me stay on the wagon when purchasing clothing and cosmetics (which she offered to sell me on the spot at a deep discount) I was given a bible, the "Winter Color Book." It contained such pearls of wisdom as, "In fact, for most of us, its refreshing to be released from our 'safe' (and often wrong) brown and beige wardrobes."

To further protect me I was given a card with my color swatches glued to it. Whenever, I felt the urge to buy say, khaki or yellow, I could meditate on the swatch card and be guided to a color that would treat me right.

I had occasional flings: a yellow turtleneck, an olive scarf, a pumpkin sweater, brown pants, khaki shorts. For the most part, however, I stayed true to my colors. I loved them and they never asked me to do anything I didn't want to. No risk required.

AND THEN I went on a retreat. In the first session, our facilitator, who could barely sit still, opened with, "Let's start off introductions." Okay, safe enough.  "Tell us your name and a bit about yourself by choosing a color as a descriptor and why. I'll go first. I'm Aletheia and I am neon orange with excitement."   

Uh oh, Crap. I'm in deep trouble here. Danger, Will Robinson. Danger. She might have candy...

I let the others talk about their colors first. I was anxious. My colors were picked. Black. Purple. What color AM I really? I didn't want to use blue because it was, well, blue. And that wasn't me that day. I took a deep breath and stepped into the alley, "My name is Pam and the color I choose is brown because when I mixed paint in junior high art class it just came out as brown. Recently I learned that getting brown is a more complex process than I imagined."

Some work to be done here. Risks to be taken. Forbidden worlds to be explored. Complexity to be understood. I wonder what else is in that alley.

I have issued myself a second personal challenge for 2014: to risk making friends with the entire color wheel, including brown. I'm going to walk down that alley boldly, eat that candy, ride that motorcycle, break those rules. I am going to be this:

And I am going to dance with my dangerous new friends:

I'm going wear this:

And this:

 (Notice I have boxes at work, too.)

 On the day it was 9 degrees in Harrisburg I stopped at a big box store and gathered all the brown paint chips I could find.

And more paint chips.

After cutting them apart and removing the names, I will be renaming (re-framing) the color hues as I fit them into my life. I'll post the colors as I go, repeating the same process with yellow, orange and sometimes green. At the end of the year, they might merge into some sort of installation, incorporating some of those empty boxes. There is just no telling what they might convince me to do!

**In high school I had a green v-neck sweater that I wore often. My father hated it. He thought it was an awful color on me. I don't remember what happened to that sweater. I think I might have gotten rid of it because it had a burn hole. I was irresponsible with fire.