She's like a rainbow...

I was recently asked what my favorite color is. I realized that I don't think I can choose anymore. Well, unless a 5-year-old asked me, because they don't respond well to vague answers.

As a young child, I loved red. All the princesses in my coloring books were scribbled red. I didn't have time to color anything else, apparently, so there were books full of scribbled-red Cinderellas and Snow Whites with not a hint of another color anywhere.

At some point, I transitioned into loving the color blue. Anything blue. It matched my eyes. My bedroom growing up was blue. My favorite subject in school always got the blue folder. My quilt in my college dorm room was blue. And most of my clothes have been blue.

I've developed infatuations with other colors as well. I'm totally loving a brilliant lime green with turquoise and a bright true blue in my living room. My bedding is the most luxurious wine color. And I have a thing for brick red dishes.

But now that I'm finally studying art, I can begin to see why I loved to look at catalogs for the stacks of possible colors of sweaters, bathing suits and chinos. Sometimes I love a certain color for the way it looks next to another color. Sometimes I love a color for barely being there, and I'll love another for being so totally saturated I can taste it.

Now that I paint, I've noticed the seemingly infinite continuum between each primary color, the tints and shades of each step along the way. How can I possibly see one color and say it's my favorite? Today I adored the purplish flesh tone for a small section of shadow under the nose in the portrait I'm painting. It's not even a "color" in the standard sense of the word. I'm quite certain they don't make any yarn in that color.

On another knit blog I read once, the author (I think it was Cari) was talking about how knitting changed how she felt about color and how she looked at color. I think for me, knitting anchors me in colors: colors with names; colors that other people understand; colors that can be reproduced. Even with the thousands of colors of yarn, they still come in actual colors- pink, teal, black, beige. I think I might disappear in all the possibilities of color if left to my palette and my oils.