Saturday, December 26, 2015

Rambling in Color

I think I heard somewhere that colors don't exist. You know, that sort of thing where it's like, your brain just perceives them as certain colors or whatever. It's kind of upsetting because I'm obsessed with colors. Does this just further prove that everything I care about doesn't really exist?

I took a Pantone quiz a while back that tells you how keen your color vision is. I got a perfect score. I can distinguish colors almost as good as a woman.

The names of colors are also pretty relative. We have no way of knowing what colors looked like when Isaac Newton was analyzing a spectrum of color from his prism. If he documented them, then they've faded with age by now and if we attempted to restore them we might go too far in the other direction and miss the mark completely. So, we have no way of knowing for sure what blue looked like exactly to Isaac Newton.

I prefer to think of blue as a color that is tiptoeing towards teal. Not the modern version of blue - what is commonly referred to as "electric blue," which is actually violet. Alright, so maybe I don't believe in relative colors, because if blue is actually violet, then what is violet? It has nowhere to go!

Here are some colors I'm working on:


Friday, December 25, 2015

An Awfully Positive Beginning

It's hard to say why this is happening, but I'd like to think it is a happening of sorts - similar to the art happenings in the '60s. It all began exactly one year ago. I was talking with my mother-in-law about what I (really) wanted to do with my life, and during that conversation a seed of The Creatures of Yes was planted. I'd already been thinking of making videos with puppets and things, but saying it out loud made it seem more concrete. I spent the next year teaching myself to build puppets. I took my creations to the National Puppetry Festival where I performed twice at their prearranged variety nights. With trembling hands I saw my characters take on a life of their own. And there was the old magic again! ZAP!
Puppetry, for me, is channeling something from somewhere that you could never access otherwise. What spirits are contributing to this work? I'd like to think that Richard Hunt is looking down on us and sending waves of guidance from beyond. And Sister Mary Corita Kent's hands are hovering over mine when I cut a piece of paper. And if I am just imagining it... what's the difference really?
We're listening carefully to the echos of a sound that started sixty years ago and broadcasting our own television show from an imaginary station.
What is this? Jerry, what is this?