For quite some time, I've had a penchant for the color black. I've stuck to a black wardrobe, with very few exceptions, since middle school, and artistically tend to stay with black inks and paints, only more recently embracing various shades and hues of browns. Well, a little while back I began to notice that this new color kept coming up in my life...it would catch my eye in all sorts of ways, where it ( and few other colors ) have rarely evoked as much response. I suppose you would call it turquoise, that beautiful blue-green color, and I love all shades of it. It caught my eye adorning two beautiful women with red hair in the same day, and then I noticed it in abundance in an antique store, in various ceramic objects. While attending a lovely birthday party for the young son of an artist friend of mine in her amazing home, I was admiring the colors she had painted the walls. She is most certainly of a darker aesthetic taste, the way I am, and I was intrigued that she had chosen to paint the walls in two rooms two differing shades of this same beautiful blue-green color. I asked her about it, and as she often does, she fascinated me with some interesting, extensive, and rather morbid information. She said it was a color that was often used to paint the ceilings of porches, around Richmond, and in other Southern cities. It was called "haint blue", and was believed to keep away all the "haints", or haunts. Intrigued, I did some more reading, and the whole history of this color is really quite something. The color was meant to represent water that the spirits could not cross, and was reported to be used first by the Gullah culture, a mix of African tribes that made up a large part of the slave population in the Carolina Low Country. They would use this color to paint the doorways and trim of their homes, and the tradition spilled over to porches across the south. I will never think of colors quite the same way again, and am eager to learn of more that appeal to my rather dark tastes.
In the spirit of this discovery (no pun intended, of course) I present this piece. Enjoy. <3
~ Courtney Elizabeth
I'd also like to point out the use of blue in Arab culture...blue painted around doorways and used in amulets of blue eyes...to ward off the evil eye, and evil spirits. Blue was a color chosen for boys because they were favored more than girl-children...hence given extra protection. There's a lil' more to chew on!
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