A Place To Draw Blood Laughing

Two posts in two hours? What what?
Elizabeth wrote about teal. What a great color. So brilliantly calm. Almost aggressively serene, really, like pictures of terra cotta terraces overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

I have a very conscious, very sensualist relationship with color. I am an oil painter; I grew up saturated with the modernist art movement (generally post-Manet, pre-Malevich) and have spent entire years of my life with paint under my fingernails.

I moved to New York, and one of the very first things I decided was that I would never drink coffee, and I would never wear black. Oh, the precious laughable idealism. I grew up in a little New England town, and I wanted to stay connected with that, as though somehow my heritage was all wrapped up in my actions instead of my memories.

Six years later, and I drank two cups of coffee and an espresso shot today. Almost my entire wardrobe is black and white. I’m struggling now to change this. (Not the coffee part. I love me some good strong coffee.) But I’m working to bring color back to my life.

What happened, of course, was that I did a little growing up, and a lot of theatre tech, and I started hanging out in the scene. And I realized that I look fabulous in both black and white, because they both possess the inexplicable quality of being simultaneously effortless and dramatic. Simple. Stunning. Then three years ago, along came a suspicion that not only did black and white suit me, but business clothes as well. My style, which had always tended to a thick mix of eccentric art student crossed with clean-cut yuppie, started going more clean cut. I kept my studded belts, my enormous collection of jewelry, but started wearing blazers. Then buttondowns, then slacks. In blacks, and whites. All of a sudden I looked at myself in the mirror one day and realized I could pass for 30-something on Wall Street.

I had completed a peculiar mental separation of connecting bright colors with youth and muted colors with maturity.

People are always thinking I’m older than I am. My scene friend Rob spent the first three years of our friendship convinced that I was approximately 28, despite also being an undergrad. Age is an enormous defining factor in how the world reacts to a person. I get treated differently when I dress in a black blazer and slacks, and I’m convinced that it’s because I look older. I get better service in restaurants, politer staff in retail stores. I get interest and attraction from completely different sources.

The thing is, contentment in age works both ways. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life representing altered tastes and maturity levels because of how the world might treat me. Young people rush desperately to grow ourselves up until the moment we overshoot and all of a sudden it’s all the same anxiety reversed, trying to preserve a youthful face that we forgot to appreciate.

So rather than destroy the mental separation I created, I’m working around it. I’m 24 years old, and damnit, I will act and dress my age. I want to get past the use of clothing and color to signify maturity, and convey myself through action, speech, and intention. (Any wonder why I like blogging?)

Predictably enough, this makes my scene clothing curious. I had forgotten how obsessed the scene was with black. I forgot about the dress code because I always fit it. I forgot that scene members tend to treat people wearing color like tourists. What, vanilla people have a monopoly on blue dresses and green cords? I think I missed that memo.

The thing is, people like big, easy markers. And people like to feel as though they fit in. If every single person in a community subconsciously accepts a prescribed color scheme, eventually the scheme becomes a dress code. It’s easier to feel comfortable in a room of people with questionable tastes if all the people are wearing obvious signifiers. Black. Leather. Yes, we’re all freaks here. Don’t worry, you’re safe.

Please. Worry. Dress codes, subconscious or not, encourage conformity and close-minded atmospheres. Our tastes can afford neither.

For me, colors have personal implications, and often mentally illustrate portions of my life. The color black is all mixed up with dark spaces and maturity and elegance and diamonds and leather. It is intimately connected with the traditional scene.

Blues, especially buzzing brilliant blues like cobalt, pthalo and aquamarine are all over my memories of growing up, of open spaces, Cadillac Mountain and the Atlantic Ocean. Bar Harbor. Eric Hopkins. Blueberry ice cream.

Slice fire-engine red into the blue, and that’s my family. Lobsters on blue willow china.

Lay mild pear green and antique gold side by side, and that’s every geeky subculture I’ve ever gone exploring in. That’s me in a petticoat and a corset at a Renaissance fair, sitting on thin fall grass, drinking gold hard cider.

I want to mix these spaces up, make new connections, allow new ways of thinking about values and shades and tones. I want to wear my peach silk dress to the club, and wear my black leather vest at work. I want new relationships in my paintings, new ways of exploring the sensual, heady nuances of color.