hue & cry

I've always been very sensitive to color - the wrong combination of colors can set my teeth on edge. (Oh, no...not the olive with the turquoise! I don't care if they're both green, Mike. Just no.) Patterns drive me crazy, which is why I'd rather look at the half-unfinished walls in our house than the variety of slate blue, burnt orange, and goldenrod country-fied wallpapers the previous owners had put up. But put a luscious cobalt next to the perfect crisp apple green? Bliss. A deep velvety eggplant next to a creamy golden ecru? Oh, my. Heaven.

I could go completely deaf tomorrow and never really miss music. But lose my beloved colors? Might as well just put me somewhere quiet so I can just whither away. When my father died, one of the things I knew I wanted was his old, beat-up book of calibrated colors. He was a union painter and would carry it with him to work everyday. When I was a child, I'd love to just marvel at all the slight differences in hue and gradation. I'd put colors side by side to see how they looked together and when I found a particularly good combination - it was as if something resonated within me. "Ahhhh," my brain seemed to say, humming with satisfaction. "Perfect."

And like a chef that can taste a dish, identify all the ingredients, and reproduce it, I can see a color and then copy it in paint. Or perhaps it's more like a musician with perfect pitch. Perfect palette perhaps? Whatever it's called, I think I might have it.

I took this test and got 100%.