Color Narratives/Orangey Skies

Orange Peel,  19 x 25 inches, acrylic on paper with iridescent copper patina.

The depth of meaning in blue is as deep as the deep blue sea, and could go on ad infinitum. It’s one of the more difficult words--like orange.

This is the first page of my Blue Book, an artist book I'm working on where every page is some shade of blue. I haven't yet decided what the content will be; I have started it but have not begun to know how to finish it. Getting the cover done , or the "frontispiece", is a good place to start with indecision. In some creative projects, the first "stone" placed is the foundation for the whole thing.  The work is strictly sequential,  and abruptly stopping in the middle of it for a new idea kills the initial idea. Happy accidents are sometimes a pleasant surprise,  but we can't interrupt the sequence with ABCDIJKRST.  The map you make at the beginning doesn't allow for any variations or “desire paths.” (The red bled under some of the surrounding pages, and I went to fix it, but I left it in as a "happy accident". Perhaps they are drops of blood from paper cuts).

I had the idea that when you opened the book, blue was already made ironic with its opposite (red/orange). Incidentally, this is the only piece I'm working on now and has almost 300 pages that have to be "blued" in some way, but also should reference its opposite, colors representative of what the world feels like at the moment, and ideally, will be expressed in the content. That is at least the current vision of what this could be.

My decision to integrate red on the first page was reflective of current events. However, the original idea for the Blue Book was from a long time ago, based upon several books I was reading on the color blue (Bluets), as well as Wittgenstein’s Blue Book. 

The blue note in music is also obvious--a signifier more of ambiguity than of sadness. The suspension (a semitone above the major third) is also kind of an ambiguous blue. But why did we call it "blue" in the first place, and what is the linguistic connection with that word's association with emotions? But in the context of a continuous ominous red, a blue sky would be refreshing. In terms of emotional triggering, orange is the new blues.

It's An Orangey Sky

Orange has gotten a bad rap over the years. It is difficult to rhyme, but The Cars used it ("it's an orangy sky, always it's some other guy"), perhaps relationship blues felt while watching a pacific sunset.

But the orange-blue gradations simply must have been from seeing the diffuse glow of low angle sunlight at sunlight snuffing out the blue wavelengths at sunset. It can all be quantified if that softens your sadness:

“In this digital age, we find that even the pictures on our smartphones are entirely made from numbers. And the blue sky on a sunny day? That too is made numbers. A blue sky is generally seen as a shading of blue, a gradation of light by wavelengths that change in the range of 450-95  nanometers... the blue sky is painted with blues by a wide range of wavelengths...it confuses the difference between mathematical continuity and real-world continuity. It comes down to the difference between the mathematical model of the tiniest elements, the gaps, and moments and the real world of atoms and the excited behavior of their subatomic parts.” (The Clock Mirage, p. 50)

If we are capitulating to New Normals, we may begin to appreciate the orange skies, or like the blue skies on 9/11, cleared of all aircraft and the irony of the silent sounds they would have made out of earshot. 

Color of Fear

What did Warhol see in orange so as to use it in Orange Car Crash?

Green hues sometimes seen in tornadic clouds are seen as an ominous portentous green. One could study clouds and skies in paintings forever. (In fact, there was a book about this: Weatherland

Somehow orange became associated with toxic miasmas and was used in several dystopian science fiction films and novels. Much of consciousness is like a film, so it makes sense that we make those associations. After 9/11 lots of people were saying that it was like something they saw a film. For some people, colors are in the narrative structure of memories.

Back in March when the lockdown began, I posited a new art movement Covidism and thought about what the characteristics of the movement would be, and I made this image with orange:

Orange is semiotic with runaway global warming:

From James Lovelock's The Vanishing Face of Gaia:

"The IPCC is right to think that it will take thousands of years to undo the harm that we have done and that it our terms there is no going back. They are also right about carbon dioxide in missions: the response time of the earth to carbon dioxide change is 100 years. But it is wrong to think that nothing can happen rapidly in climate change. Aerosols in the atmosphere, snow and ice albedo, ecosystem response, and of course human response--any of these can cause a perceptible climate change within months".  (p. 61)

The Police depicted it accurately in the dark chord changes of Invisible Sun, but with rays of hope ("It gives its hope when the whole day's done"), after the bleak "they're never going to change this place by killing everybody from the human race". 

The orangey Santa Ana winds are coming in October:

"Santa Ana winds fan the flames of southern California's biggest wildfires. And like the fohn of the Alps, they also influence people's temperaments .. In his short story, "Red Wind," Raymond Chandler wrote that on a night when the Santa Ana blows, "every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge."  (From the book, 18 Miles: The Epic Drama of Our Atmosphere and Its Weather)

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But orange is also associated with citrus, a form of aromatherapy. If I ask you to think of an orange you will imagine the taste of it and perhaps it will activate your salivary glands. But in synesthetic experiences, the associations overlap. I have only seen the orange fire skies in photographs, but actually being there--and not just experiencing it in either photographs or in films--must be a different experience because you are getting the combined input from the olfactory and optic nerve. The brain is either confused by the two signals or the combination of them for the sake of conserving energy (or "head room"). This must be what happens with psychedelics.

Orange is also in the absence of blue. This is why the sun sets on Mars are blue. If you lived in a city (colony) on Venus that was in the “sunset” region it would be a constant orange sky. A day on Venus is almost as long as an Earth year, so the sunsets would be as long.

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Art, books, and music about color narratives (Incidentally, one of the Human Universals (Classification of Color):

• Blue, Orange, Red (Painting by Mark Rothko in 1961)
• Derek Jarman - Blue (Film)
• Orange Is The New Black (Series)
• Burnt Orange Heresy (Film)
• Some of my "orange" music. (Listen to Atacama) 
• From Leonard Shlain's Art & Physics: "red is the color of aperture, dilation, and distance, and blue is the color of attraction, collision, and contraction...in a complete reversal of the truth before our eyes, blue turns out to be the color of fire, red the color of ice. (p. 182)

Some miscellaneous color associations/metaphors/ironies:

• Lamp Black is the soot from lamps
• Bone Black (Ivory Black) and bone white is from the burning of bones
• Old Master paintings with themes of rebirth are full of toxic pigments
• That explanation of his heroin addiction, voiced by the jazz trumpeter and singer Chet Baker (Ethan Hawke) in Robert Budreau’s moody biographical fantasia, Born to Be Blue says it all.
• Joni Mitchell's Blue
• David Lynch's Blue Velvet