Color At Full Volume

Notes on Sicilian color and the honesty of pigment

There are places where color describes things. In Sicily, color becomes the thing itself.

The yellow of a building is the same yellow as the powder in a market stall, which is the same yellow as the rind of a blood orange split open in the sun. The red is the red of paprika and pepper and a door painted decades ago and never softened by anything but weather. Pigment moves between matter without losing itself. The light makes sure of this.

Sicilian light does not flatter. It comes down hard and direct, with the indifference of a thing that has been doing its work for thousands of years, and it leaves color nowhere to hide. A wall is yellow because it is yellow. The ochre is what it claims to be. There is no atmosphere to filter the statement.

What Sicilians have understood, or perhaps just accepted, is that under this kind of light there is no point in being subtle. A red door with its panels painted green. A teal that has weathered for a generation and is still, somehow, teal. None of it is decorated. It is declared.

The food participates in the same logic. Tomatoes ripen to a red that requires no editing. Oranges develop interiors that go past orange into something that wants its own name. Even the peppers, stacked tight in their plastic tubs, refuse a single register. The earth here is in the business of producing pigment, and the market is its showroom.

You begin to understand the painters. Why they came south. Why they stayed. Not for subject matter, which they could find anywhere, but for this. The chance to see what color is without anything in the way of seeing it.

A seagull crosses a yellow wall and leaves its shadow behind, perfect and black. The wall accepts it without comment, then goes on being yellow.

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I post my photographs and thoughts here to show that there is still beauty in the world and to promote the idea that there is grace, positivity and inclusivity in the everyday.

Throughout history, goodness most always wins, and the arts can lead the way in reflecting the good all around us. There is still light in the world.

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