Color Theory

Burnt earth pigment: iron oxide heated until it turns from yellow to the specific red-brown that gives a Tuscan hill its postcard look. Sienna is a place and a color and I've been to one but spend more time with the other. In the studio — and I use that word loosely, it's a spare room with a north-facing window and paint on the carpet that the landlord doesn't know about — I mix burnt sienna with titanium white and get skin. Not my skin. Not anyone's skin exactly. A suggestion of skin. The warmth of it. Every painting teacher tells you don't use black for shadows. Use the complement. Use blue. Use purple. Burnt umber. Never black, they say, because black is a hole and shadow is not a hole — shadow is the shape light makes when something gets in the way. I didn't understand this until I looked at my hand against a white wall and the shadow was blue. Blue. My hand is brown and its shadow is blue and nobody told me this for twenty-six years and now I can't unsee it. Color is a theory the way gravity is a theory — technically debatable, practically undeniable. I drop the tube of cadmium yellow and it falls. Gravity. The yellow hits the floor and it's yellow. Color. Both facts. Both theories. Both stains on the carpet. I paint most days. Not because I'm good — the jury's still out, the jury being my mother, who looks at each painting and says it's nice, which is her word for everything from my art to the weather to the emergency room wait time when I broke my wrist last year. It's nice. The burnt sienna goes on. The shadow goes blue. The carpet gets worse. The painting gets closer to something I can't name but will recognize when it arrives.