Colors Make Life Better
The value of colors in the everyday
Los Angeles feels like it’s coming alive again. Flowers are blooming. The petals match the colors of my clung-onto pandemic hobbies — nail painting, knitting, and water coloring. I range from bad to adequate at these hobbies.
Nail polish is just as likely to end up on my hands as on my actual nails. The knitted sweaters I happily wear. The paintings start as attempts at replicating something real. They end as swaths and spots of pretty colors, resembling nothing more than my curiosity about the pigments.
The forced domesticity of the pandemic made me find novelty and beauty in alternative places. I do not enjoy cooking, computer screens, or staying in one place for very long. Colors kept me afloat — the manufactured ones within the materials of my hobbies and the natural ones of the plants and creatures around my home.
Over the last year-ish, I’ve spent hours watching the geckos that live near me. One ate a bee. With everyone hiding or traumatically on the frontlines, it sometimes felt like the geckos were the only ones with a bit of normalcy.
Colors make life normal. They make it exciting. My neighbor’s succulents grow the oddest and fuzziest purple, pink, and blue flowers. The early European botanical gardens spent fortunes to collect plants like these. I can understand why.
They’re delightfully odd and beautiful. That’s probably why so many of us purchased plants over this last year plus. Beyond the fact that having other living creatures nearby soothes us, we also enjoy looking at pretty things.
The thing could be a decorative houseplant, a bright pink sweater, a blotch of green ink on the page, or purple nail polish. Colors make life fun.
I’m glad I have these manufactured colors in my continued, mostly indoor life. I’m excited, though, to see the colors of the world, to get back to traveling to look at pretty things.
I want to watch an octopus change colors, to see the depth of color in a Redwood’s bark, to notice how the sky’s blue tones look different in other parts of the world. I don’t want to watch videos of these things. I want to be there. Until then, I’ll keep watching the spring flowers bloom in my neighborhood and clinging to my colorful hobbies.
(I love sharing things I’ve researched. If you want to make cute sweaters, check out Petite Knit’s patterns and Mother Knitter’s yarn. For nail polish, look at Sunday’s colors. For gorgeous watercolors in a system you can take hiking: Art Toolkit.)
