greige

i learned a new word this week, as i picked out colors, and then picked out other colors to match the first colors, and then picked out accent colors to contrast appealingly with the combination of the first two colors. apparently greige is a word now. you add a little gray to beige and you have greige. these are the things you learn when you start focusing on color. i have also learned that color is entirely relative. i sort of already knew that, but it has been brought home viscerally as my painters have slowly covered my walls with true, museum-white paint, exposing the previous walls (which i always considered pretty white) to have been a putty colored kind of peach. it’s a testament to how much this has blown my mind that i first looked at this photo from my archives and assumed these were crow feathers, and that the true black background behind them had simply exposed their lack of total blackness for the grayish hue that crow feathers had always been, but i had just been too deluded–to much of a color absolutist–to notice. in fact, these are goose feathers, and are actually a shade of gray, at least that’s how they look to me. but who knows?

thee beach feathers (probably gull or goose)