I hate Red

I hate red. It's my least favorite color. I don't look good in red. I don't like red cars. I don't like how red fruit punch stains the carpet when you spill it. I don't like how blood is hard to remove from the carpet. When I think about red, I generally do think about blood. The image of my bathroom covered in it before I rushed to the hospital and almost had to have emergency surgery stays with me. I thought that I was going to die. Red is an intense color, and I think I'm too laid back to enjoy that kind of intensity. Red is associated with energy, war, danger, strength, power,. determination, as well as passion, desire, and love. 

All of these are things that I generally push into the corners of my life -- those are not at all things that I concern myself with most of the time. Red acts on more than just an emotional level though. Something about the color enhances the human metabolism, increases respiration rate, and raises blood pressure. Why is this color SO intense? I think it's a primal association -- a conditioned one that is ingrained in the human subconscious. Because blood is red, and we know that blood is one of the most essential keys to our lives, we place a high reverence on the color. 

Light red represents joy, sexuality, passion, sensitivity, and love.
Pink signifies romance, love, and friendship. It denotes feminine qualities and passiveness.
Dark red is associated with vigor, willpower, rage, anger, leadership, courage, longing, malice, and wrath.
Brown suggests stability and denotes masculine qualities.
Reddish-brown is associated with harvest and fall.

Color Changes

I think these colors really reflect my change in attitude and personality in the past four years. The first photo I took in 2004, when I first got a digital camera. The second photo, I took a few days ago in my apartment. Both of them are photos that I still like, and I feel like they carry through the same sort of photographic idea or style -- photos of still objects interacting, whether separated or together. The colors from the first one are bright with lots of contrast. At the time, I lived in Florida. All the lighting in that photo was natural, direct from the window in my room. The colors of those objects all remind me of Florida too. The light browns remind me of sand and palm trees, and the bright blue reminds me of the summer sky and the beautiful beaches where I was born. I was fifteen when I took that picture. 

The later picture's colors really reflect where I live now though. The colors are a little darker and more industrial. Purple, blue, teal, and a light neutral color all come together to give a calm yet unexpectedly exciting feeling to the picture. The colors work together in ways you would not expect. I think this is a real reflection of where I am right now. Moving here from Florida was not something I wanted to do, but as I've lived here, good things have happened. I never used to like any of those colors, especially the purple and teal, yet now, as I've matured, they've come to really fit into my life. As I've gotten older, I've experimented a lot and moved away from the bright, more simple colors that I used to be drawn to (like in the first photo), and am now trying to put colors that I would not expect together to see what happens. 

Color Changing Sidewalk

France's Eurovia is developing a temperature-sensitive varnish that changes color to provide a visual indication to all road users that the pavement is freezing. Once it warms back up again, the varnish returns to its default hue. Durability trials are underway in several areas of France that experience severe weather, and if the coating holds up well, we could all be watching out for pink stripes in the winter. 

I think this is an awesome idea -- what better way to put color to use than to warn motorists. It's difficult to tell when the pavement is iced over, or even just if the temperature outside is cold enough for it to be, so having a visual reminder of that seems like a completely logical idea. Hopefully, this idea doesn't become too expensive though. Eurovia may have created a product that has the potential to save a few motorists; whether or not they make it readily available for the use of the public by not gouging governments exorbitant prices simply because it's the government. Regardless though, it's an interesting idea, and I hope to see it on the streets. 

Color Blindness

I've always wondered if people see color the same way. Not in the exact sense of color blindness, where there are definite color receptors that are hindered, but instead that they have a full range of color reception, but what they "see" as red might be what someone else sees as green, but because they have grown up with a full range of color, they can see everything with contrast and thus have just been conditioned to see that green as "red." Or maybe that is crazy. 

Either way, the concept of color blindness in itself is a complex one. According to Color Matters, Color-blindness is the inability to distinguish the differences between certain colors caused by an absence of color-sensitive pigment in the cone cells of the retina. Most color vision problems are inherited and are present at birth. Approximately 1 out of 12 males and 1 out of 20 women are color blind.

I wanted to see what a picture might look like to someone who is color blind, so I used the charts on Color Matters website about color blindness and recreated an image in photoshop. 

Color Chatter

This is probably one of the coolest paintings that I've seen in a while. It's by Martina Nehrling, and I think it's awesome. It looks as though a paint store is in the act of throwing up, but it works. Her strokes are minimal and singular, but there are so many colors that even this simple abstract shape is made interesting. At that, because of the multitude of brush strokes, she achieves a sort of unity through the repetition, despite the fact that each stroke is different. The colors in this as well are very true feeling -- there aren't any muddled down colors or desaturated hues, and Nehrling obviously paid special attention to making sure that this unbalanced shape achieved balance through her use of color. It seems as though this painting could be Nehrling's test-strokes for color she would later apply to a different painting, but no... this is it. I feel like she's trying to express the weighty accumulation of individual thoughts and ideas that cross through our minds daily. In doing so, she employs a wide range of colors, but uses them all with the same consideration, perhaps to show that all these rambling thoughts are not so much great ideas, but just a mesh of chatter. As the clump hangs, it makes me think that all of this "chatter" is superfluous -- unnecessary and cumbersome to the point of annoyance... yet it's all so pretty anyway.

Colo(u)r

Color is what makes the world exciting. Humans intrinsically are able to associate colors with emotions. Blue is calming, red is passionate, yellow is happy, etc. Somehow as we mature, everyone seems to to associate the same kind of feelings to the same colors. Sure there are variations, but everyone is able to come to some sort of consensus on the basics.

Performance Art

Performance art is ridiculous. As you can see from this video, it seems as though the entire purpose of performance art is to bring some sort of disruption out into the public -- for everyone to be forced into experiencing some sort of discomfort at your own hands. The fluxists and the dadaists try to justify it as being meaningful and self-satisfying, but I think it's just advanced forms of ADD manifesting in overactive imaginations. I mean -- honestly... why else besides that or drugs would someone cover their head in honey and gold leaf and explain to a dead rabbit in a low whisper what their drawings meant... I mean... seriously...

Seriously...

Doing the shadow activity with Niya was difficult because all I could do was laugh the whole time because I knew how ridiculous it looked / was.

The performance I made for class never made it up to youtube. I had one person stand on a chair while another person walked around that chair reciting the name of each immediate family member until they'd named them all. Then they would switch and keep doing so until someone forgot one of the names. It didn't work out that well, so I'm not upset that it's not on youtube. Here is Laure's though. I am the feet.