I’m on this orange kick as you may remember. Being more observant of where and why it pops up.

Some recent spottings:

Garden Shears. The words Cuts 2x easier on orange handles.

Liquid ant baits. Keep out of reach of children. Caution. (In Spanish too.)

A coffee cup and saucer. A real sit down, non chain coffee shop in Cloverdale where people actually talk to each other.

So we have cautionary tales and tinges of comfort. What else?

As Rudolf Steiner writes, “I try to anchor color into my daily life. Without my awareness of them, colors can float away….I can in a way, digest color. Colors keep my soul soft. Lack of color hardens my soul.”

-from the book Color, by Karen Speerstra

I understand this.

Orange feels alive. It’s sticky. It brightens up every mood. It’s strong yet playful. Marmalade, Brazil sunsets, California poppies swaying in the dry grass.

What else?

How about poetry? I remember “verde, que te quero verde,” from high school, but orange? After a few searches one name popped out.

Frank O’Hara from the New York school of poets.

He went to college to study music and was influenced by contemporary music and visual art. His peers were artists and musicians. He also wrote poems and soon they were published influencing his decision to switch majors and to leave Harvard with a degree in English.

His evolution supports the concept of full expression. One art influences another art. Colleagues across disciplines are bees pollinating each other’s studios and work. A healthy hive. I hope we don’t lose sight of the face to face as technology continues to become mainstream in our lives. (I’m so happy I didn’t grow up with technology. The ability to sit and day dream has its powers!)

But technology allowed me to quickly access one of his poems called…

WHY I AM NOT A PAINTER by Frank O’Hara

Here’s one stanza that I particularly love:

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

I encourage you to click on the link to read the whole poem and find out more about him.

So in the spirit of SARDINES I present to you ORANGE.

XOXO,

Francesca