It's Hard To Paint A Feeling

On Color Blindness.

It's not hard to choose a paint color. What's hard is painting a feeling.

Most people assume color is something we see. I don't. I think color is something we feel first and see second. One of the people who taught me this was a color-blind man.

His wife hired me because their home wasn't working. The house was filled with beautiful things. Bright artwork. Warm woods. Reds, oranges, yellows, and purples. Black-and-white photography. Strong patterns. Strong contrast. Everywhere I looked there was evidence of people who loved color.

Yet the walls were painted a creamy yellow-white that felt almost invisible. It wasn't offensive. It wasn't ugly. It wasn't wrong. It simply wasn't participating.

The color reminded me of a old tooth.

What fascinated me was the disconnect. Here were two people who clearly loved color, yet the largest surface in their home felt detached from everything around it. The walls weren't helping all that beautiful baggage belong together.

So I changed the overall color to a soft green. Not a green that announced itself. A green that moved with the light. Sometimes gray. Sometimes tan. Sometimes green. It created a relationship with all the colors already living in the home.

The black felt calmer. The oak floors felt richer. The reds and purples felt more supported. The yellows and oranges felt brighter. By changing one color, every other color became more itself.

A few days later the husband called me.

"I should tell you something," he said. "I'm color-blind."

His color blindness was real. He couldn't see the wall color the way most people could. The missing cones in his eyes made certain colors unavailable to him.

"But I can feel the difference," he said. "The house feels calmer."

That conversation stayed with me for years.

You may not be able to see the difference, but you can feel the difference.

Color is not simply visual. Harmony is not simply visual. Belonging is not simply visual.

The longer I worked with color, the more I realized that seeing isn't always the problem.

Sometimes people can't see a color because they are physically color-blind.

More often, they can't see a color because they don't want to.

I once worked with a couple who were determined to make a yellow color work in their home. Unfortunately, their entry was painted mint green, even though they insisted it was sage green. The distinction mattered because the yellow they wanted would turn that green blue, and blue next to their orange floors would create a turquoise relationship they would never enjoy.

"It's not mint green," they kept telling me.

So I placed several greens next to each other and asked them to compare.

Their color was clearly mint.

Silence filled the room.

Then the wife looked at her husband and said, "I told you it was mint green when we first saw it. I knew it was mint green. I just didn't want it to be."

The mistake had been so disappointing that she convinced herself she was seeing something else.

I understood.

We've all done it.

We've all owned the lipstick that suddenly turned orange, the shirt that made our skin look sick, the bedspread that somehow became gray, or the paint color that looked perfect in the store and completely different at home.

We tell ourselves we didn't see it.

But often we did.

We just didn't want to.

Color has a way of revealing the truth. It refuses to become what we wish it were. It only becomes more itself when placed in relationship to other colors.

That is why choosing color is rarely about a single color.

It is about companionship.

The six colors of the rainbow want to be in good company. When they are, we feel it. Even when we cannot explain it. Even when we cannot see it.

And sometimes, as a color-blind man once reminded me, we can feel the harmony long before we understand why.