"Whatever you are about, be about it in everything you do"- anonymous
(From Omni's Colorbook:)
As a colorist artist, master of the ten thousand colors, and by the power and authority vested in me as a bellwether person, I invoke and declare some "new" clothing colors. For the healing of the people!
Dull and grey feels like an artifice at the moment. Not down to earth, not "natural". Just drab, dirty, and tired. I don't condemn your impulse to hide, and yeah, it's camo.
Black is a refuge that is so tired and overused that it is the defacto background of our daily life. The uniform of coolness that isn't. It is a cop out.
The true background color is indigo like the sky. Like the many gradations of blue jeans. If Jesus walked the earth today, I bet he'd be wearing blue jeans.
The super bright, fully saturated colors are nice. But at this moment, they shout. And shouting is the wrong tone for this time. For this moment in time, we need to strike a note that is a little softer, gentle, even loving.
I mean, I certainly won't renounce those brilliant colors. They feed my soul. But everywhere I see, that seems to be all that is being made today, shouting colors with black, the most striking combo.
Is it that we feel we must shout to get above the cacophony of attention sinks that constantly tug at us? I remember when society was too timid to rock a fully saturated hue. Such a loud color, how garish! Now neon jackets fly by on the running trail. A kindergarden teacher once confided to me her secret to being heard above the din: Instead of raising the volume, lower it a bit.
My new colors are soft, but present and clear.
Cheerfully confidently assertive, even.
Light infused. No shade added.
To invoke love and light.
Right now, when you go around, you see way too much black and blue. Cold and dark. It is a downer! Black is dark dividing lines, black is shut, opaque, black bloc, black site, black out, locked down.
I do understand. Some of the things that people today have to put up with have left us vibrationally beaten down, all black and blue! You feel like you need to strap on a shield! No wonder we are tempted to retreat into the walls and shadows.
That is why it is time to wake up, turn the page, bring in some more light, some new colors.
Forget white. White is too much a luxury, it would take me at least five changes of white clothes to get to the end of a day unstained.
I scan my nice organized closet full of my collection of rags for body draping and I see none of these new colors. Wow, I've been in a funk I guess.
It is important to be true to your colors, wherever you find them, whatever they are for you. So I set out to find them for myself, in the shape of body wrapping fibers. Clothing is a form of expression and one way to feel and interact with my colors.
I am aware of the symbolic levels too. These colors are like rays of new energies in our shared atmosphere, and clothing is but one way to invoke their presence.
I look around in stores. Admittedly, I go to used clothing stores that by definition aren't the latest thing, but still, find little. Seems like our whole culture is in a bit of a funk. Not that unreasonable, really. I decide to do something about it. A small thing is all I can do. But cannot one match start a roaring fire if conditions are right?
I end up bringing home a bunch of white shirts to dye myself.
Maybe you would call these the spring colors. The effect I'm going for is just a notch brighter than pastel, but without any grey added. The colors emerge when I put a dilute wash of a pure rich color over a white. A lot of light still prevails. I am delighted with the results!
For practical everyday use and wear, I like the feel of these colors, nestled in with the undyed naturals, the wool colors and unbleached tans. And of course, blue jeans.
Now, everywhere I go in the new colors, people come up to me to tell me how much they like them! I wonder what the butterfly wing fractal effects will be of brightening up someone's day -literally- might be....?
"Still not sure what I'm going for, but I'm gonna go for it for sure"- the Grateful Dead
PostScript: I happened to see what the New York Times was showing on its fashion page after I wrote this, and it's my colors! It is so refreshing that even the usually blank faced models are smiling:
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