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| Photo by Daian Gan Pexels |
Author's note: what color is nothing? was the prompt that led me to this rabbit hole. I'm not sure what I want to do with this. I am thinking I would like to know what unexpected lessons others have learned about themselves through teachers. I feel like the dumb girly is a different piece or I need to weave it better into the end in order to justify the space I give to the dumb girly thing.
In 7th grade art class, Ms. Glazer taught us about mixing water colors, the color wheel and the potential of water. She also told me that I was not an artist. It stopped my random doodling on the margins of my Holly Hobbie journal. It made me hesitant when I had to take industrial arts in 8th grade because we had to design a t-shirt for silk screening. How do I design on silkscreen when I have lost the ability to art?
Despite my lack of talent in art, I did remember that black can represent the presence of all colors. White is colorless. But at the end of the semester, what I really learned is that unlike black and white, when you try to mix any of the colors that you are not supposed to mix, you get poop brown. Brown like the mud pies I used to make under my grandfather's mango trees. Poop brown me.
In my 9th grade news writing class, Mr. Bass talked about black ink as one of the colors needed to create other colors, so in printing, black is crucial and necessary. Mr. Bass was my only African American teacher. He taught my law class in high school, made up of mostly boys and three of us girls. He would be talking about a brief and questioning us as he shuffled back and forth alongside our rows. Whenever he called one of us girls he would say, "come on dumb girly, show them what you got." His class made me wake up extra early to prepare for his class so that I would not be a dumb girly, but every day, he would greet me at the door with hey dumb girly! I learned about oxymorons from Mr. Bass like necessary blackness and powerful dumb girlies.
But in physics with Mr. Bailey, he taught us that in the light spectrum, black is the absence of color while white is the presence of all colors, a result of the scattering and reflection of the full light spectrum. That knowledge did not help me in physics. I could not figure out how to make the math of physics as magic as light spectrum rainbow refractions in my brain.
What Mr. Bailey did was to help me see that I am an artist on white paper that holds the endless "full light spectrum" of possibilities for words and word play that is art. From Ms. Glazer I learned about being specifically descriptive about color. Is the ripe mango on my grandfather's tree orange, no it's more than just orange, but a dusting of cinnabar to make it more earthy and I get vermillion. The specific words and the intentions of a well chosen word put on the white paper was my own way to paint through joy and loss, laughter and angst. From Mr. Bass I learned that this kind of art is in black print. I do not need to play with fonts or write in gel colored pens. The words itself make up the art. The black ink makes it permanent and is a nice interplay with intentional white spaces that take as much planning and breath control as the words. That too is the ability to art.
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