The Colorman by Erika Wood

Author:Erika Wood [Wood, Erika]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary, Family Life, Fiction
ISBN: 9780981932101
Publisher: Tatra Press
Published: 2009-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

ORANGE

I am not a painter, I am a poet.

Why? I think I would rather be

a painter, but I am not….

…One day I am thinking of

a color: orange. I write a line

about orange. Pretty soon it was a

whole page of words, not lines.

Then another page. There should be

so much more, not of orange, of

words, of how terrible orange is

and life. Days go by. It is even in

prose, I am a real poet. My poem

is finished and I haven’t mentioned

orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call

it ORANGES….

—FRANK O'HARA

Fall leaves and pumpkins. Work zone. Browns and clays, desert earth. Ceratine, a bad fake tan and the usual alert level these days.

Though orange is a large and important part of the spectrum, and the key to most flesh tones, rarely does it figure solitarily on the palette. Orange darkened is a good chocolate brown, rich and deep. Lighter, it is creamy-pale flesh, pushed this way to yellowish, that way to a greenish undertone. Mixing a decent flesh tone usually begins with the orangey brown of Burnt Sienna, opened out by Titanium White, lightly for darker skin tones, more thickly for the lighter ones. The reddish undertone is more conspicuous at this stage, and a warm yellow needs to come in and soften that. Depending on the tone of skin you’re looking to match, some version of orange needs to bring it to life. A crimson mixed with cool-lemon yellow yields a bright reflective area; any of the Cadmiums, even a straight-from-the-tube Cadmium Orange, gives deeper shadows their warmth. Human skin has been called almost every color, from white to yellow to red to brown to black, but unless you’re drinking colloidal silver, it actually leans some way toward orange. Orange: everything that is not blue. Blue’s complement.

Morrow crushed, distilled and incorporated remnants of the matter he’d gathered, from ashes to crushed bits, to scrapings of soot left from flames, to poundings of gold and powdered stones. It was important that a pigment stayed true and intense, that it retained its luminosity and hue and not damage pigments next to it or mixed into it. He tested, adjusted and retested this quality repeatedly with washes on small cards. James was working on this project now with Alvaro’s overtime help. Morrow relied on Alvaro’s availability, and his unique ability to be present and helpful, yet somehow invisible and non-judging. The two transformed the sundry materials he had gathered into pigments, dyes and lakes, incorporating them into the various supports, glues, and gessoes he had created. They filled tubes and bottles and boxes. The project was nearly finished.

The portable speakers resting on the passenger side seat were cranked all the way up. Rain drove a rental van alongside the railroad tracks and river views on her way in to the city.

Karl hadn’t seen or said anything about the paintings she’d hung for the dinner party. He had been so involved in his own drama that he had overlooked them entirely. But at least the timing of his collapse had not been too disruptive to her project—she’d been able to finish them.

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