Winter Metamorphosis

Long rays of late afternoon sunlight slant through snow-frosted trees behind our house. Frigid temperatures have already arrived although winter is still officially two days away.

 

There’s something about colours on a clear winter day that defies logic. Skies aren’t just blue, they’re a vivid azure. Evergreen trees change colour and become a blackened shade closer to charcoal than forest. The snow that we describe as white is anything but in its shadows and on crystalline slopes. I don’t understand why winter air has an intensity and clarity that is so different from that of any other season.

 

While I don’t know the reason I certainly admire the effect. The snow-covered mountains bordering B.C.’s Fraser Valley were spectacular in today’s chilly sunshine!

Black and White and Colours of the Rainbow

I was cleaning out a drawer (well, ‘cleaning’ is a relative term… I was looking for something and it required moving stuff around in a messy drawer) and I came across a few errant felt markers that belong in my craft box. While inserting them into their proper container I took care to put each one into its rightful place, organized in rainbow order. No, I’m not an obsessive-compulsive person or a neat-freak (if I were, would that drawer be so messy?), but some things just beg to be organized.

 

Black and brown were at one end of the set and white at the other. My hand hovered over that white marker. Should it really be there next to the very vibrant red, or would it be more appropriate at the other end next to the black one — the two ‘non-colours’ together? Indecision!

 

Memories from past art classes pop up and I am reminded that white, in fact, IS a colour because it is comprised of equal amounts of the three primary colours, while black is not because it is the absence of all colour. At least I think that’s what the Additive Colour Theory says. So the white marker will stay where it is. On the other hand, there is the Subtractive Colour Theory that says “black is a colour when referring to the colour of pigments and the colouring agents of tangible objects” and “technically pure white is the absence of colour, because you can’t mix colours to create white”. So maybe the black and white markers should reverse positions? But black beside red, and white beside brown? That just doesn’t feel right.

 

Okay, okay, so now I AM obsessing.  Maybe I should just toss those markers back in the drawer.