A Certain Magic and Mystery

What is your Color Personality?

A colleague asked why I print using the cyanotype process–that’s where the blue of my images come from. Why are your images blue? So he sends me a link to Color Personalities with a question: “Is this you?”

So I’m reading it and reading it and I’m getting surprised by the second. All of these were true!

If this is your favorite color you are conservative, reliable and trustworthy - you are quite trusting of others although you are very wary in the beginning until you are sure of the other person. (Scott-Kemis) Well I’m not sure about the conservative part, but this statement is very true.

You are not impulsive or spontaneous - you always think before you speak and act and do everything at your own pace in your own time. It is sometimes said that blue is a color to “think to, but not to act.” (Bellantoni) This is certainly true in my case, I think a lot, but I don’t act! It’s sad, but true.

You can be rigid - you like to stick to what is familiar to you and it is hard to sway you from your path - you stubbornly do things your way even if there is a better way. Actually that last one was one of the ideas behind this photograph, I’m stubborn and I will not listen to advice.

Jonah & The Whale

Who’s familiar with the story of Jonah and The Whale? That Jonah was the same, he wouldn’t listen to advice, and this time it was from God himself. In the story, God was ordering Jonah to preach at the town of Nineveh, but Jonah didn’t want to do it, he wasn’t listening and he tried to escape, and the whale swallowed him as a result.

These two examples fascinate me to no end: the color personality index and the story of Jonah & The Whale. What part is free will and what part is destiny?

There are rational explanations to these things. It’s coincidence. It’s chance. Anyone can read themselves into that color personality profile. Anyone can see themselves in that Jonah & Whale story. We create meaning in the events and stories that we come across. And yet it is fascinating to think of these things as somehow unexplainable, that there remains a certain magic and mystery in life. I want to believe that we could exist in that in-between state, where the rational grounds us, and at the same time, we are open to synchronicity, to chance, to coincidence.

Works Cited

Bellantoni, Patti. If It’s Purple, Someone’s Gonna Die: The Power of Color in Visual Storytelling For Film. Burlington: Focal Press, 2005. kindle file.

Scott-Kemmis, Judy. “The Color Blue.” Empowered By Color. Web. 13 Oct. 2014.