Colour Blind
Designers and quilters rely on a certain level of colour sense: to describe personality, to reinforce a message, to create a sense of depth, to differentiate and emphasize certain areas and to give balance to their work. Some colours play well together to create a subtle calming influence, while others challenge each other and bring dynamic energy and artistic tension to our work.
We all have our own personal colour preferences; colours that soothe us, that excite us, that disturb us and make us uncomfortable. However, I often think of a line from one of my favourite movies:
“Une couleur laide, ça n’existe pas.”
There is no such thing as an ugly colour.
We could think about talents as colours; each one adds another level of interest to our lives.
We could imagine the priorities we choose as colours; it's not feasible to devote all of our energies to work, or to maintain "code red" at all times, but there is a time and place when that energy is required.
If we visualize cultures or religious beliefs as a range of colours, we realize how dull our global image would be if it could only be drawn from a monochromatic palette.
Don't get me wrong: we all know that there are beautiful photos, fantastic paintings, quilts and other works of art that have been created or designed using a single colour. But what if our choice was entirely limited to that one colour for the rest of eternity and we were unable to distinguish any other possibility? Our lives certainly would not be as rich as they are now or could be in future.
The colours available to us are infinite...part of our job is to learn how to see them and to appreciate them so we can use them to paint our lives in bold and colourful strokes.