Reading 2: The Anthropology of Turquoise

Meloy, Ellen. “ The Deeds and Sufferings of Light.” The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on desert, sea, stone, and sky. Vintage, 2003. 3-17. Print.

            What struck me most in this article was author’s unique sense of contemplative play with her work/observations. While embracing who she is, she is able to quite clearly articulate both her discoveries and her pure awe of the world around her.

            One way she does this is by using specificity in her use of color to “paint an image” and bring the reader to a specific place that she knows and loves. By connecting adjectives and nouns to colors, she provides tangible metaphors that the reader can understand. She states, “Colors bear the metaphors of entire cultures. They convey every sensation from lust to distress” (p. 7). By choosing her words very carefully, the reader is then challenged to understand her specific decisions of perception. I believe that specificity, coming from careful thought which then comes from care, is an important aspect to developing “craft” in the art world. It is through purposeful use of language and love that we learn to understand both our own work and the work of others. “It seems as if the right words can come only out of the perfect space of the place you love” (p. 15).

             She speaks of painting as “ an instinct of motion, a kind of knowing that is essentially indirect and sideways” (p. 6) and of a never-ceasing task that calls her to “climb to the juniper tree” once again. This struck me in regards to my own practice. Being a task-oriented person, my instinct in making is to plan out every decision before I have touched the clay and therefore, concentrating my work enough that my ideas/concepts read loud and clear. This does not work. Instead, it takes an amount of releasing my mind and allowing my hands to take over the process, allowing myself to watch as my hands and all their tactile knowledge make the decisions. This is where my “exciting moments” happen, my stylistic voice beginning as a whisper. The more I listen, as Meloy does, through my eyes, ears, and hands, the more I learn.

            Meloy also writes of the phenomena of interactions with color. She suggests that colors, being controlled by our perception of light, are more about physical experience than about understanding. She depicts them as emotional and cultural lenses, “intimate relations of an energy field” (p. 7), “fictive space”  (p. 11), and even stories. She sums it up by saying “Color is the first principle of Place” (p. 16). I believe that Meloy is suggesting that working to not just understand but to feel color brings you to a place that is unique to you through perception but is significant in experiencing the beauty of the world around us. We must open ourselves up to receive the unexplainable, indefinable, sensational world of color.

Molly Post