When skies are gray

I’ve been at a loss for the past week as for what to write about. Thus, this blog is a composition of loosely tied together thoughts. Indulge me. 

Walking into Nichols Library to do an ungodly amount of math and physics homework, I was eager to be distracted. And thus, my attention was drawn to the back wall. Now, I don’t often explore Nichols because, like a fugitive Lisle resident, I have an unfounded fear that they will yell at me to leave. But this, I could not resist:

A collection of cat paintings: calico, tortoiseshell, tabby… etc. The display really resonated with me, and I’m sure the librarians caught me staring in wide-eyed awe. I mentioned within a previous post about my own art that I hold a deep admiration for artists that demonstrate a unique style and consistency within their pieces; something that differentiates a bunch from a collection. This collection achieved that, and the artist in question? Nine years old— color me impressed. My eyes kept returning to one of the center paintings in particular: 

My iPhone camera fails to do justice to the piece. Though subtle, the artist uses a myriad of colors, layered and intermixed, to bring the painting to life. Specifically, I loved the hints of pink within the fishbowl, and the frame itself, lined with a mossy green. 

The sight reminded me of a short story I clipped from a magazine years ago. In searching for it again, I learned that it was based on Allerleirauh, a fairy tale in which a king promises to never remarry until he finds a woman of equal beauty to his dead wife. The king concludes that the only suitable woman is his own daughter (classically twisted Brothers Grimm). The daughter agrees on impossible conditions: that he must provide her three dresses, one like the sun, another like the moon, and the last like the stars. 

This is where the short story that I am familiar with, “The King’s Wish” by Aimee Bender, comes in. Set in a textile studio famous for dyeing garments with impossible intricacy— leather shoes that look like rocks, a purse like a freshly bloomed rose— a team of artisan works with “the Color Master” as their head. The Color Master, dying, assigns the narrator, a lowly apprentice, the task of making these dresses for the princess. The Color Master guides the apprentice through the assignment, encouraging them to see nuances of shade and to put emotion into the dresses. To see not just gray within a rock, but blue, green, and purple. To color a dress like the sky, filled with anger and courage for the princess’s situation. 

 

I first read that story when I was about eight or nine years old, and it quite literally changed the way I viewed the world. 

In my personal journey with art, I’ve had to relearn how to look at things. Often you are caught drawing what you think something looks like, rather than it actually is. You think you know what an eye, an apple, or your best friend looks like until you have to decompose the lines and shades that compose them. Similar applications can be found within color. An art teacher of mine encouraged me to contrast with complementary colors. “Shadows” bring to mind the color black, but she pushed me towards red apples with deep green shadows: yellow pears offset by purple silhouettes. 

If you’re familiar with Ashley aka bestdressed on Youtube, 1) Let’s be friends and 2) you would know that her content is highly fashion and aesthetic oriented. As a prior film major, her artistic sense shines through her work (I continue to be in awe of all that she does.) Within one of her old videos on how she edits her photos, she notes that iPhone cameras often capture shadows as gray-toned. The Curves adjustment feature within editing software allows the user to adjust the levels of red, green, and blue of the shadows, midtones, and highlights of a photo. Infinite possibilities, though difficult to get right. Ashley combated the ashy tones by bringing blue, red, green, or a mixture of the three into the shadows. I don’t really use the curves adjustment feature for my own photos (too overwhelming), but this comment was also life-altering for me as I had never previously thought of iPhone cameras as lacking in their capture of real-life. A photo, I thought, was the truth. From there, like the vinyl-listeners of photography, I’ve spiraled into my pretentious camera era, further elaborated on within my camera collections post. 

I’ll stop here before I get into off-white, earth tones, and warm/natural lighting (drooling), but thank you for reading a perhaps interesting spread of musings!