To Bead True Blue

Color

Color is a basic structure in the poetics of light and still carries within it the discernible traces of a mysterious power, which evokes the long ancestral incubation of human creativity when color was a beautiful necessity of life and was woven into the processes of imagination and perception through a complex mélange of iridescent plumage, delicate opalines, flower paillettes, transparencies, satins, and myriad filaments of light, leaves, and silks. Many ancient people of diverse origin were drawn to compositions of color, shape, and line that anticipated language and art. The encoding of color to intuition and memory can be traced to the ancestral passion for balance, cohesion, and the quest to make sense of the world through ornament. The poetics of light imitated and repeated the natural sequence of color, shade, and pattern, at the center of existence, and transformed it into a sacred entity capable of attaching the processes of acquiring knowledge to an arrangement of symbols and patterns. The poetics of light reinforced the human relationship with the power of color and celebrated the dual reality of ornament as both the art of being seen and the art of disguise. There was no dividing line between object and vision, or color and light; they were complementary energies entwined since the beginning. The contemporary art of ornament reflects this primal way of seeing through artisanship and handmade techniques. At the origins of creativity, there is a place of visual impressions that we are drawn to. The journey to return to this place is like unraveling an ancient tapestry, thread on thread, to weave it again into the fabric of who we are.(Also see: The Nature of Bead)