I thought I had good color sense before I began gardening.
I’m an artist, a designer. I can paint. I know how to combine colors for aesthetic or emotional effect. I have good visual intuition about color relationships.
But it’s only now, after I’ve begun gardening, and spending hours in Nature, that I realize my color sense was only superficial.
When I was falling asleep the other night, after a day spent in the garden, the phrase kept coming to me: shades of green. The more time I spend in the garden, the more shades of green I experience.
“Forest green”, “kelly green”, “chartreuse” and “apple”… before they were just abstractions in my mind, flat and square like a Pantone chip or a fabric swatch. Slightly more tangible, there were greens like “viridian” that brought me back to painting, a thick shiny dollop on the tip of the palette knife. Textural, three-dimensional, but still neutral, informational, factual.
But now when I think of greens, they’re not abstract, and they’re not neutral. Each comes with associations that are experiential and emotional.
When I hear “grass green”, I think of at least three different colors. The rich color of the lawn when it’s lush and full. Health and satisfaction. The yellowish color in the patches where it’s dry. A compulsion to nourish. The matte, muted, blueish green of a single blade of grass; completeness. The color doesn’t cause a feeling, the color is a feeling.
And all colors now have an effect on me which is more than visual. It’s a full sensation, a tingling. Like I can feel energy coming off it. I don’t have synesthesia, but I imagine this feeling at least approximates that experience. It’s not color sense, it’s color sensation.
And it makes me look back on the years that I thought of myself as an artist, without this feeling, without this connection to Nature, as a superficial, ignorant time. I thought I knew more than I did.
If you’re an artist, I strongly encourage you to go spend some time in Nature. Spend a lot of time in Nature, actually. See what it does to your color sense.
And if you’re a gardener and not an artist: give painting a try. You might have a talent you didn’t know about.
From the Garden 