Color

"It is astonishing to remember that what we regard as color is in fact a form of mirage," Carolyn L. E. Benesh writes in the most recent issue of Ornament Magazine. "Color is such a beguiling state due to its intrinsic phantasmic quality, as it does not really exist but is based on how light waves refract off our eyes."

Benesh is reviewing the Fashion in Color exhibit at the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, in New York City. The subject is 300 years of Western fashion grouped by color--black, white, yellow, red, and multicolored, each grouping within the same-colored room. I'm guessing this presentation has a way of jolting the mind out of habitual seeing.

I imagine walking through a room of yellow with expressions of clothing as adornment in yellow from different times and I have a sense of yellowness. How the body responds, how the mind interprets. Yellow as royalty, yellow as sun, yellow as brazen.

Isaac reminds us that the perception of the world changes--the world we see now is different from the world that was seen a few hundred years ago.

I wonder what will be "seen" today....