“scatter the sky with my blazing heart”
© 2019, Molly Larson Cook
18″ x 24″   Acrylic and ink
Available

You already know how much I love color – that animal that wags its own tail.  My color chart is always handy and my paint box goes well beyond red, yellow and blue although I enjoy mixing my own colors from those and a few others that sing to my color-lovin’ artist’s heart.

But when I was looking something up the other day, I ran across a page of fictional colors and found a whole new world at my fingertips.  Two things happened:  I hungrily scouted the list and tried to visualize each of those colors AND I began to think about colors I could name for myself.  What would they be?  How about the early morning mist over the ocean that’s not quite white and not gray either.

I always liked the name for Pacific northwest skies when there’s no rain, no sun, just light known locally as “cloudy bright.”  (Personally, I always thought Cloudy Bright would be a great name for a stripper.  I’m past any potential stripping days but if anybody out there wants it, it’s yours.)

Back to the morning mist.

I learned long ago that naming commercial colors – for clothing, paint, cars is something akin to the poet’s art. I also learned from a dress shop owner that this year’s Aqua will be next year’s Sea Green.  Changing the names from year to year is part of the marketing strategy.  What fashion maven would be caught in a black dress when the color of the year is Raven or Jet?

When I moved to a new place and registered my car, the clerk asked me the color.  I read from the title that it was Borrego Beige Metallic.  She gave me the fish eye and said, “I’m just writing down beige.”

Naming commercial wall and house paints is better.  I use samples of paint colors for the art and I just bought two shades of latex orange – Melon Sorbet and Fahrenheit.  Go figure.  I also have several more of these samples (and I’ll let you figure out the colors) including Exotic Blossom, Taffy Twist, Deep Breath and 100 MPH.  As I mentioned, naming paint is definitely a poet’s art.

I’m going to work on a name for the color of that morning mist at the beach (something more descriptive than Morning Mist, thank you very much) and I’ll also work on the color of my peach yogurt (not peach color), the color of the dryer lint after I dry a load of towels, the color of a dried up apple, the pink shade your undies turn when you wash them with a pair of red socks, the oily rainbow in a mud puddle.

All those color animals wagging their tails!

Here, to tweak your brain, are a few of the fictional colors.

Flange is “every color of the rainbow, all at once” in the book The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles by Julie Andrews Edwards.

Gloxym is a fictional color coined by James Parry (“Kibo”) on his FAQ. He describes Gloxym as the true color of the sky.

Octarine – the color of magic in the Discworld fantasy novels, described as resembling a fluorescent greenish-yellow purple.

Pleurigloss is said to be the favorite color of Michael in a first season episode of The Good Place. He describes it as “The color of when a soldier comes home from war and sees his dog for the first time.”

Pleurigloss is without question my new favorite color, wagging its tail when it sees that happy soldier. Woof!

Blessings all,

Molly

(The title of the painting is a line from Amy Lowell’s poem, “Fireworks.”)