Color my World Forest Green

Red is my favorite color, but I never wear it; rather I appreciate it from afar.
Smokey red shoes are acceptable. Lipstick, velvet Christmas ribbon, dark brick walls, silk couch pillows, and parrot wings.

Green is its complementary. Hot piney scents in the Tahoe shore, fingerlings of needles, dusty, soft against the Lake. Red~orange crawdads, don't pinch my toes! Tasty meat after a whole afternoon of brothers diving and mother's steaming. Mountains of mayonnaise!

At CCAC the assignment was to create art using 2 complementaries. The red and green made a weird beautiful thing with gouache. A yin and yang except it was animal-ish, noses, fur and dinosaur hands blending into it's opposite.
Animals are favorite things. Saved my sanity many times over the years.
An orange striped cat named Fatty. Lying against grey and white Thinnie in a basket...yin/yang. The vet had it misspelled. Thinnie, not Thiny. Got to get that right!

Bassets are soothing, and funny. Nothing compares with middle of the night snugging patting a warm soft Opal Basset. The Vet had to correct the last name. NOT our family name, rather the name of a babysitter years ago. She could not see over the steering wheel of her big 1951 Chevrolet, but she could see through it...watch out, here comes Opal Basset driving down Marin Avenue!

A Pakistani Tiger Gecko has eyes like gold dust in amber. Body color? Unrealistic rubbery white, orange, black, yellow. Silly Putty. No expressive faces, like panting dogs. Mechanically opening the mouth.

Silly Putty was a weird color. It was very cold and stretchy soft. And, the miracle: pressing it on the funnies gave you wonderful graphics to manipulate...I always had to stretch it past the artistic design to break it. Torn between art and a satisfying snap in my hands. Bonus, a storage egg that click nicely over the putty melting inside. Careful! Leaking strings could be cut off, end up on the rug, sticking permanently. You had to scratch as much as you could off the fibers with a fingernail, then smoosh in the rest to hide the misdeed. Cutting it with scissors was wonderful, too, to see the weird inside. Pulling, pulling, pulling gave it a melted corded slab of Dali's melting clock.

Oh the joy of a box crayons...Especially brand new 72 colors with a sharpener built right into the cardboard! You couldn't lose it! Lining them up on the oak tongue and groove, by rainbow colors or individual hues was 1/2 the fun. The smell of new ones, the sharpness of line with those crisp points like a cap on a medieval tower. Scrabbling lines and shapes on the crisp business paper with logo. Turn it over, but the logo still showed through.

Old crayons, paper peeling, could be pushed along, ending up as pebbly rubbings on the kitchen floor...oops, crayon smudging past the paper edge. Get rid of the evidence. Where are the art supplies? Jumbled in the old copper toy chest, with junk, broken parts of stuff, but down deep were the old crayons. The payment for pleasure? Scraping fingernails on the corroded metal bottom.

Thick poster paints: Heaven. Cold bright frosting dripping and smoothing over the easel. Not always adhering to idea inside my head. Mixing, wow, it made a vibrating dark pink...but you could see green in there, too?

Cutting and pasting was an absolute delight. Cutting shiny magazine mosaic squares to glue onto thick stock ,making cards and advent calendars, and flip books. I made construction paper hats for the budgie bird. However did I get him to wear them?

Animals again, brown spotted dogs and floods of puppies, black cats, Peking and Mallard ducks, birds, fish, turtles, spotted strawberry blonde fawns, minnows in the creek, quail in the garden, Red breast Robins bob bob bobbing, poking at the lawn, gooey green frogs in the pool, hawks flying over, turkey vultures tipping, bugs rolling up, mosquitoes pinching.

Sky blue with curvilinear, gleaming clouds over cold sands, brought with it sea life. Fringy anemones suddenly close, mouthing my finger, bumpy starfish in those oceany colors, sandy orange and purple. Even a tiny octopus, brought from the tide pools after clamming, squirting black ink in the bucket of seawater. Reeling in a huge silvery bass from the roiling sea. I saw angel wings clams' long mouths, sucked back into the shimmering, almost quicksand beach. Sand crabs scuttling into hiding. Sandpipers run, run, running on the toothpick legs, in and out with the waves. Pelicans softly diving from windy sky to Payne's grey sea.

They saved my life. Thank God for color, air and life.