Color-Shock!
Alex Hinders, 2013.
Colored pencil and pen.
My dear hypothetical reader, I’d like to tell you a story; it starts back in the foregone year of 2013 and in the dreary month of November. It was dark and cold and my mood was so sour that I was adding tons of black to my drawings. This was; of course, due to the fact that I could feel my arch-nemesis, Winter, creeping up on me. It just so happened that due to a lucky turn of events I had an opportunity to go down to New Mexico and possibly move there in the near future.
I’ve been trying to find a way out of Iowa for a while now, and not succeeding — I originally had my eyes on the state of Colorado. That never quite happened, obviously. So naturally, I agreed to go, and man, was it amazing. There was so much sunlight! And having been transplanted from such a dark atmosphere to such a bright atmosphere, all of the colors in nature seemed amplified, pushed beyond their limits and onwards to new heights. It was like I had forgotten what colors looked like in the first place, or perhaps had never known.
I decided to define this type of experience as color-shock. I’m pretty certain I’ve shared a similar experience before but I’m not sure which blog entry that would be under; it was a moment in college when I noticed just how incredibly yellow a girl’s shirt was. That, too, was a moment of color-shock. I suppose the word probably doesn’t need a dash but I put forward the argument that it makes the word look cooler. I’ve also experienced moments like this before except involving music in place of colors — I figure that must be music-shock.
It is a powerful feeling, dear readers, and a strange one. It is a good feeling, because it is the feeling of re-connecting with yourself and feeling whole again, but it is also tinged with sadness, as you begin to realize what you’ve been missing.