Colors

I’ve always loved the store American Apparel, though not for its vertically integrated business model, or its body-unconscious spandex styles, or the smug superiority of its hipster employees with disintegrated nose cartilage. No, what I’ve loved about it is the polychromatic organization of their merchandise, the broad palettes of cotton-poly t-shirts making thin slashes of color on their hangers, the repetition of the same article, each one identical except for the wavelength of light reflected. On gray afternoons, I would walk into a retail location and wander the aisles, trailing my hands over the rainbow gradations on display as if their appeal were tactile instead of purely visual and I could absorb something through my fingertips. I used to imagine myself possessing the fortitude of spending power to buy a meticulously arranged closet full of classic v-necks—one in each of the thirty-odd bold colors—not to wear but to aesthetically please.

In recent years, my attention has shifted a few storefronts north on Maple Ave. to Dick Blick Art Materials. A quick aside: I love art. It’s the perfect creative outlet for a bilaterally brained engineering student. Granted, I dabble more than dedicate myself, doodle more than depict anything. I don’t take art classes. I’m not sure whether I don’t have time or I secretly don’t want to risk ruining it as a leisure activity. It is a full-blown hobby.

I have amassed quite a collection of art materials: three kinds of paper, four kinds of pastels, sharpies, watercolors, gel pens, even hot glue. My latest addition was a metal tin with 72 different colors of pencils. I invite my friends over to “make art,” which involves flipping open a 24”x36” pad, picking a title as a jumping-off point, and then proceeding by any image, implement, or idea which impels us to fill up the white space. The products of these sessions decorate the walls of my bedroom.

As much as I enjoy the process of creating art, most of my inspiration comes from the art materials themselves. There is nothing quite like a brand new box of art supplies—the purity of untouched pastels, still wrapped in a cylinder of waxy paper and uniform thorough in terms of length and cross-sectional area, or the perfection suggested by unsharpened pencils, their points still long and tapered in a way that can’t happen with the tiny boxes with angled blades that peel off thin ribbons of wooden shaft. Before I shred the shrink wrap holding each stick of color nestled tightly in its bed I am struck by the possibility contained within this box. Once opened, once a band of color is removed from its station in the rainbow, once the block of solid is pressed against paper, that is when tips dull, bodies snap in half, crayons become scattered across the floor and a rushed re-boxing places a mandarin orange next to a cerulean and the chromatological chronology is lost for good. The power of the materials seems compromised.

Art is messy and life even more so. I know that joy I get from art supplies comes from the way I can use them together, not from preserving their identities like obstinate high schoolers. Even so, there is always something scary and intimidating about breaking out a spanking new set of pastels, everything still in its seemingly proper place. I end up taking a few moments, stroking the perfect rainbow through the thin plastic as if something could be absorbed through my fingertips.