The Color, Blue

“There is no blue without yellow and without orange.”
Vincent van Gogh, Post-Impressionist, 1853-1890

The color blue takes up a lot of space here. Perhaps it is the broad expanse of sky and sea. Blue houses and shutters protect those living inside from evil spirits (‘haints’) – a Gullah tradition that has its roots in the African American sea island culture, and includes stories like ‘haints’ can’t travel over water, which is another reason for the common use of blue paint, perhaps.

Historically, there is also interesting research that indicates that the number of people who died of the mosquito born disease of malaria was reduced substantially when the region was producing its highest quantity of Indigo, the blue color. The production, by slaves, was quite profitable to the plantation that produced Indigo for export, in the Lowcountry in the early 18th century.

But just right now, the earth is offering up her most breathtaking version of the color blue in the Carolina Lowcountry. The hydrandea bush is in bloom like I cannot remember. This one spectacular round blue bloom is in my neighbor’s yard on Legare Road on Edisto Island.

Rosebank Farms, 4455 Betsy Kennison Parkway, Johns Island, hosts its 4th annual Hydrandea Festival 10am – 4 pm June 13th and 14th. Growers and horticulturalists will answer questions and provide advice about care, variety, and location. Call 843-768-0508 or write them at : email@RosebankFarms.com

Pink and the color purple

Pink is big in Charleston. Think of Pinckney, as in Charles Cotesworth, or even better, his mother, Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722-1793) probably the first important agriculturalist in America, who has an amazing story that tells of her cultivation of Indigo, the color purple. Lots of people in the Carolina Lowcountry have the nickname Pink, not from the color, but the family, and they are proud of it. Pink, the color, is here in Charleston, too, the hue of many of her houses. It’s an island color, its message visually complementing the cerulean blue of the sky, and reminding us of the roots of many of Charleston’s original settlers who came from Barbardos.

Pink House at No. 17 Chalmers Street, is one of my favorites. It is a small and unassuming house, one that was built about 1712. It is said to have been tavern in the center of Charleston’s ‘red light’ district, and may have been used by “practitioners of the world’s oldest profession”. It is the oldest stone building in Charleston and some say, the oldest standing tavern in the whole South. For me, the little house has the quality the French call, une belle laide, a phrase that we do not have in English but one that means ugly beautiful. It’s a quality artist’s are attracted to, one that the painters, and the poets, found in the weathered and crumbling beauty that inspired the prolific work of Alfred Hutty, Josephine Pinckney, DuBose Heyward, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Elizabeth O’Neill Verner, Julia Peterkin, Edwin A. Harleston and many others during the Charleston Renaissance, the period between the World Wars.

For me, for an artist, color is a language in itself; my own work is expressive and vivid. For blues musicians, the color blue describes the flavor of the sound, their sorrow, the ‘blues’. Alice Walker in her book, The Color Purple, says in her own colorful way, that “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” Somehow I think she might be right.