Colours Defining My Day
or black, pink, orange, yellow, red and green ...
If you are a regular or if you have landed on Tarantula: Authors and Art welcome. This year, we hope that our stories as well as the artists that we feature will inspire you to start your own creative journey, and our house team of writers will join you on this ride. This February our inspiration is Swedish artist Lotta Melin. Our contributor, Miranda van ‘t Wout, looks at the colourful drawings of our featured artist, and reflects on how much colours affect her day. What about you? Is there a meaning behind the colours you choose everyday? If a friend forwarded you this article, welcome; if you like it, share it or why not subscribe?
Here I sit, staring at the colourful works of our artist of the month. What do these colours mean, I ask myself and laugh at the same time. They mean everything, not just one thing. They change meanings like light changes colours. Not one person is the same, not even for one moment. How can a colour convey the same meaning for everyone? Today I feel blue in a cheerful way. But I also don’t reach the edges and I do feel the scratches. I am a colourful piece of art.
Black
My stories are written in black ink. Thoughts from my head put down on paper, ready to be uploaded and of course being transformed, in other people’s minds – maybe in your mind too. I need my black, for black defines, shapes and outlines my life. There is also black in the question mark I put behind the word WHY. Black in the exclamation mark I like to see behind fun words and happy sentences. And not to forget the tiny amount of black you find in the dots that leave space for interpretation…
Pink
I stop my bike behind the truck that stands in the broad street next to the parked cars along the pavement. I use the pause to take off my backpack and start looking for something that is, of course, at the bottom of my bag. When I look up again I see a man next to the truck, pressing a button to lower the tailgate of the truck. He is wearing a white coat that resembles a doctor’s coat, but isn’t. It is a butcher’s coat. I realize when he agilely jumps via the tailgate into the truck. He disappears in between an upside down forest of pink carcasses, only to show up again a minute later with one of them over his shoulder. I am horrified. The idea of this freshly killed, bloodless meat against his neck and cheek makes me shiver. I realize that for me all the screaming of all the pigs in the abattoir is concentrated in the withdrawing colour pink that I spot at the collar of the white butcher’s coat.
Orange
Today I sit in my car, happily wearing my new, soft pullover in a light pastel – an orange. This particular colour was fashionable in the Eighties when I proudly wore a striped pastel pullover with matching leg warmers That had been just before my thirty years of marriage. This time around it was just after this same marriage. Today it felt as if these two girls wearing pastels were connected again. As if time in between had not passed at all.
The man - whom I knew only through messaging after meeting on a dating site - stepped out of his car, holding a bunch of little tulips for me. Their colour was orange. Already a deeper colour of orange – but still a shiny pastel orange. I decided that this deepening orange was the colour of transition, like the one in the sky in the hours of sunset and … sunrise.
Yellow
Drinking two litres of water is a goal I often set in vain. Most of the time I drink – including tea – about one litre of fluid max. But today I did not even succeed in doing that. So, I found myself staring at the really dark urine in the toilet. The ocher was so intriguingly dark that it looked almost brownish or even red maybe. My thoughts wondered off to the times I was pregnant and eagerly collected my pee to help women who could not have a baby that easily. Every morning I would hang this sack full of my ‘savings’ at my door and send it out into the world. It was taken by a special organization and I lost track of it. A strange feeling it caused. My pee, allowing other people to hope. I just hope it did some good, somewhere, somehow.
Red
A painful memory pops up when I see an eight year old standing on the luggage carrier of his father’s bike, holding his dad’s shoulders. The last time I had felt hands like that on my own shoulders I was very annoyed with the child behind me for several reasons. The annoyance had to do with being forced into this situation that I felt was not safe enough. All of a sudden I decided to let the child feel how unsafe we were, and I started to swing the bike. And then it happened. My child fell from the back of the bike on the gravel and started to cry, immediately. The blood on the knee was light red, with darker parts where the little fragments of stone had entered the wound and now seemed purple. I felt so much regret, I was so ashamed… So far for being the responsible grown up.
The colour red I had to face was not the colour of the blood that was cleaning and healing the actual wound – but the colour of the wound that stayed until today. The wound of inflicted pain and massive feelings of guilt and failure.
Green
Green trees, bushes and shrubs are dotted over the globe. It is like the fur of the world and knowing it is there is so comforting. The tall trees in the park at the end of my street make me look up and this walking with my head slightly up is the best remedy against all kinds of unwanted feelings that are notorious for creeping up on people who have had little sleep or rest. When I do this, I feel the sun and maybe a breeze. The rain and maybe the wind. But most of all I feel connected with this comforting layer of green.
There is a Japanese word for ‘sunlight that shines through leaves of a tree’. Isn’t that just beautiful?! One word for a whole experience. The word is ‘Komorebi’ and I’ve said this word over and over again When I say it now, I see this amazing, sparkling light green in front of me. Komorebi is my new favorite word!
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Beautiful! Xx
As nice as the beautiful orange pullover you were wearing today!