Thinking about color

My sampler quilt is continuing and has gathered into its blocks many more fabrics than I originally intended. At first the leftovers from a Kansas Troubles collection were to be the basis but I quickly determined that my remaining pieces would never be enough for the entire quilt. My husband constantly asks for brighter colors in my quilts so I started raiding the stash and pulling in brighter greens, pinks, yellows and more black and shirtings for contrast. The group of blocks is a riotous melange of shades now but will make an interesting sampler.

While I was looking at colors I thought about our perceptions of them. Take what we almost universally think of when we say "Williamsburg colors". The grayed blues, subtle tones and muted palette. The kind of colors you get with milk paint and natural dyes. It might shock you to talk to the restorers at Colonial Williamsburg to be told as I was during a tour that the shades of paint identified by the investigations in the original buildings were decidedly brighter - mustard yellows, bright greens, red.

Or consider the recent story I saw in a House Beautiful magazine about work at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home. I remember the dining room there when I visited the house over twenty years ago. The walls were a somber and muted blue. Archaeological restoration has discovered by analysis of paint chips that in the later years of Jefferson's time, the room was painted a quite jarring shade of chrome yellow, that color being available due to the recently invented chemical dyes coming from France in the last part of the eighteenth century. The newly painted room was quite a surprise. Curators acknowledged that it would shake up a few people, but pointed out that Jefferson, a progressive man, would have found the new paint colors that were becoming available to be modern and interesting.

I remember a few years ago when the PBS program "This Old House" was restoring a colonial farmhouse and a paint expert was called in to take samples and determine the original color scheme used on the exterior. This house was in an historic area and changes, including colors, would have to be approved by the Historical Society. Everyone was quite shocked when it was determined from microscopic analysis of layers of paint removed from protected areas of the exterior that the original color of the house was a rather garish mustard yellow and the shutters were green. The Historical Society - that bastion of preservation, faced with the fact that their dream neighborhood of white houses with neat black shutters was, in fact, a dream - refused to approve the new color scheme, since it clashed so badly with their idealized vision of what a colonial home looked like.

While working on the Civil War quilts project from Barbara Brackman's blog, I started following links to articles about period fabrics and came upon a photo of a piece of preserved mid-nineteenth century calico and the modern reproduction fabric that was made from its design. I couldn't help but notice that the vivid reds that were still visible on the original fabric had been toned down decidedly in the reproduction. That made me think about the rather subdued colors in many of the Civil War repro fabrics I had bought in the past. Are we rewriting color history again?

What your car color says about your personality?

Every so often Yahoo news comes up with the oddest articles. The latest to catch my eye was "What your car color reveals about your psyche". Oh, come on.

I don't know about you, but the color is often very low on my list of priorities when buying a new or used car. I'm far more worried about how dependable a vehicle it is, whether it has been wrecked, whether it has the features I need, how good is its gas mileage. Color doesn't even make the top four. Anyway, we've bought our share of used cars, where finding a specific color is highly improbable.

My car right now is a red Subaru. According to the article, you should be scared -- very, very scared. Aggressive, moody, high-speed driver with low self-esteem and confidence, that's what the color supposedly says. I was going for cheery, fun, upbeat and visible, but what do I know? I'm not a psychologist. Also, my very first car was a red VW beetle (my dad's pick, not mine), and I had not owned a red car since I was seventeen. I bought this one when I was turning 50. It seemed like a suitable gesture -- I joked that when a boring person has a mid-life crisis, they buy a red station wagon!

Anyway, if this color stuff has any credibility, a review of my car colors starts to look like multiple personality disorder -- red, blue, yellow, gray, blue, green, red. My husband's choices? White, white, maroon, white, green. (Hey, maybe he is more stable than me! LOL) I think it just says that I drove more on average to work than he did and wore out cars quicker, and that we bought what was on the dealers' lots. That was definitely the case with the yellow El Camino and the gray Sentra, although I did like the yellow El Camino because I like yellow. (The gray Sentra -- not so much. The color choices were dark gray and dirt brown. Ugh.)

My husband also buys bigger cars than I do and they seem to come in more sedate colors than my compact cars. My green Mazda was definitely a more exuberant green than his Q45, which is so dark it's almost black.

Anyway, most people buy what's available, and that's usually a pretty limited choice. The dealer isn't going to fill his lot full of red or bright yellow cars; he'll buy white, black, gray and other subtle colors likely to appeal to the most people. It also depends on the colors in vogue at the time. The powder blue VW and the yellow El Camino were from the 70's. The maroon and gray cars we bought in the late 80's, when those colors were fashionable. The blue and green Mazdas were from the 90's.

If you need a better predictor of driving style and personality, go with the vehicle model criterion. Personally, if I see a Hummer appear in my rear view mirror, I wince. Maybe it's only a local phenomenon, but my experience with Hummer drivers is that they are the most arrogant, pushy people on the road. And if the driver of a vehicle so big that my roof cargo rack is even with his door handles wants to drive aggressively -- well, I get out of his way and give him the road. Which is what he wanted, all along.