On Hating Color Trends.

Only vapid bots would choose to live in a facsimile of someone else’s regurgitation of someone else’s Xerox.

Have you ever taken an art class? Even though I was routinely - and I do mean routinely - asked by work associates, friends, and family for help on what to wear, logo design, space planning, or color help, I hadn’t thought of myself as artistic since the fourth grade until I realized I wanted to be a designer in my late twenties. I remember my art teacher at Barton Creek Elementary, Mrs. Kite (I also dearly remember my music teacher, Kevin Dunne, whom I have Googled a million time because that man changed my life by introducing me to Les Miserables and he could play Vince Guaraldi on the piano and and and I just about had the world cracked open in that class so where you at, Kevin Dunne, I salute you, Sensei!) and how she taught us to fill in a giant scribble with as many patterns as we could, and I remember my super contrived fourth-grade signature lumbering on the edge of the page, heavy with pregnant cursive droopiness.

When I finally did start taking art classes again, I was in my late twenties and I was just plain bad. I didn’t know perspective; I didn’t understand how to hold a pencil. Most of my classmates had already been in art school, or at least had thought of themselves as artistic, while I’d mined every humanities class I could and still hold my pencil like a popsicle. I felt confident, maybe even a little arrogant, about my ability to come up with concepts: my concepts were things like ‘Liminality and the Dwelling,’ while my classmates’ were ‘Oily Elegance’ and ‘Project Runway.’ But my smarts were no match for these fine folks’ fingers: the technicality and precision with which they nimbly rendered a picture, true to life, blurring the suspended disbelief between the page and reality.

I was so lucky to meet Ken Frieders in school. He is a New Englander by way of the whole world and has been bicoastal, in Connecticut and San Franny, for decades; he is a trained artist; he went to Parsons; he has an elegant discretion about him. And while most art school professors tend to be misplaced blowhards to hate other people, he lives his expertise the way Jesus tells us to live his word: the guy just teaches with his good taste and manners; his excellent skill is the subtext. And I got to be in his Color Theory class! Hooray!

Ken let me make absurdly ugly color combinations with my watercolors like algae goose poop brown and knee-scab yellow. It was during those classes that I could actually daydream and wander around in my mind while playing around, and I found the voyage of color discovery pretty humbling. Ken didn’t make me feel stupid or culturally stale for not understanding values, saturation, hue, and tint; he just demonstrated it, like it was the easiest thing and not so esoteric, and then I started seeing it everywhere.

COLOR IS EVERYWHERE.! Using only one or two colors or sticking with the same color palette every single project makes me feel cheated. It feels like only vapid bots would choose to live in a facsimile of someone else’s regurgitation of someone else’s Xerox. You feel me? The sage, the muddy uncanny valleys, even this godforsaken Drew Barrymore butter yellow. BARF, people. That color can be a gentle refreshment in only a very certain narrow number of ways, and I promise you, it is better that we all skip it.

So when I see color formulas about “color drenching” or “Prisma Color of the Year” or whatever, I definitely notice, but it gives me pause and it makes me cry a little. Paint your walls the color of your grandma’s lipstick! Go get your favorite childhood book and pick the tones from it and splatter them all over your house. You will love it!