My name is Shannon, and I am a color addict. The fact that I looked through endless images of color, searching for just the right ones and losing myself in my obsession with the next image, and then the next, is testament to my ongoing addiction. I drool as I near the paint section of home improvement stores, hiding my predilection for color from my husband as I desperately sneak paint swatches into my purse. We are not painting anything in our home or even planning to paint anything. Still, when there are perfectly good paint swatches with glorious colors to ponder? And they are free for the taking? In the Sanctuary of Color, fellow addicts understand that it is impossible to pass up those small cardstock squares of color in all their shades and tints and wonder.

And then there are the names of colors. In the Sanctuary of Color, there is legitimate sensuality reserved for color names. When one speaks mauve, amber, aquamarine, azure, cyan, cinnebar, orchid, saffron, emerald, fuschia, indigo, jade, taupe or topaz, the consonants and vowels should be rolled around the mouth, languidly like fine wine, before they emerge into the spoken air. Color addicts, like me, will always saturate their language with indigo and azure. Never just blue, which marks even the most enthusiastic color initiate as simple-minded and downright uncouth.

In the Sanctuary of Color, the newly commercialized adult coloring fad is neither new nor a fad. I will concede that because so many adults have embraced coloring, this has made it more socially acceptable for me and has–on many occasions–saved me from my granddaughter’s scrutiny and concern as I mindlessly filled up the pages of her Dora the Explorer and Disney Princesses’ coloring books with my own careful coloring. The moment when Gracyn turned to me and said, Grandma, you need to stop coloring. I mean it–you just have to stop, was the moment I knew I had a coloring problem. It is humbling, indeed, to be confronted by a six-year-old who has staged an intervention, hiding your newly purchased box of crayons who-knows-where. . .

Those who live in the Sanctuary of Color scoff at the displays of 12 count crayon and colored pencil packages. Twelve? What a joke! Twenty-four? Seriously! Seventy-two? Now, you’re talking. More is definitely better. It doesn’t get much better than spreading your colors out before you, a panoply of such marvelous pigments, all yearning for white space.

Color obsession has not been contained only to the confines of my home. No, it has reared its ugly head as I have created power point presentations for instruction and professional development. This is not a great color scheme, I would think as I created. No, this will never do. I’m going to try this combination. And given the multitude of colors and combinations from which to choose, I would create, recreate, and recreate, looking for the perfect colors. Minutes would pass–sometimes a half hour–and I would be bent over my computer, trying on better-still color combos. Who does this? Sadly, the type of color addict who also has to limit herself to looking at five (not six, and certainly not seven!) wallpaper books lest she enter an alternate color universe never to return again.

Claude Monet, perhaps the most influential Impressionist, wrote: Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. Monet has a permanent seat in the throne room in the Sanctuary of Color. He gets it. The obsession that skips along the line between joy and torment, flirting with bliss–at one moment–and with suffering at the next. In his later years, Monet’s sense of color took on a characteristic reddish tone, a common result of cataracts. For a self-professed color addict/aficionado, I cannot begin to imagine the sense of loss he must have felt when he realized that he was not seeing color as it really was. Some have wondered if he could actually see ultraviolet wavelengths of light–wavelengths that most cannot normally see–after he finally had cataract surgery. They propose that he may have perceived colors differently after surgery, for he returned to earlier paintings, imbuing his water lilies with even bluer pigments.

By Wikipedia Loves Art participant “shooting_brooklyn” – Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8947762

I like to imagine Monet with his new set of eyes, sans cataracts, sitting on a veranda, his easel before him, as the best morning light washes over his canvas. I like to think that he, like me, would be so enraptured with the marriage of light and color, that he would speak to the canvas and to himself. More cobalt. And more opaque here–use the full force of the pigment, Claude. Make it right. Make it true. In the Sanctuary of Color, those like Monet would never tire at looking critically at color, finding its truest hues. This is the sacred work they were called to, and all else pales, pitifully, in comparison.

In contrast to the Impressionist’s juxtaposition of color to color, dabs of maize alongside dabs of saffron, I have seen the meticulous work of single-haired brushes that unload the smallest bits of color on the wings of mallards and other water fowl. Watching my husband paint this way, his eyes and hands extensions of the drake’s wing, minutes becoming hours, and color unfolding slowly but surely from the breast to the wing to the tail, I have understood how inclusive the Sanctuary of Color truly is. Paul knows the anatomy of a mallard in ways that only an artist and a life-long hunter can. Each brush stroke, each color comes from a primeval and wholly personal place. For him, like other artists, color matters greatly. Neither technique, subject, nor style matter as much.  The noble pursuit of color makes all welcome in the Sanctuary of Color. If you can talk color, if you live and breathe color, you’re in.

When I visited Yellowstone Park, I remember standing in something close to rapture at the edge of Morning Glory Pool. While others were snapping photos, the names of colors were rushing through my mind. It was a kind of Rolodex-of-color moment, and it was essential for me to name what I saw before me. I would like to say that after collecting thousands of paint swatches, buying yearly big boxes of new, pointy crayons, and studying color palettes for decades that I would have been able to name the colors of the Morning Glory Pool. But I could not. These were colors yet to be named, colors that defied naming and yet longed for it. I decided that it was more than enough to have seen these colors and to have pocketed them, as only a color enthusiast can, in my soul’s treasure chest.

Morning Glory Pool, Yellowstone National Park

Those who live in the Sanctuary of Color understand that they can return to their treasure chests and admire a lifetime of colors.  Meticulously packed and sorted, one can remove them, love them, and speak their names. Crimson, cerulean, cerise, and celadon .  .  .