Wonder

Every season is a color.

Spring is violet.

Why? My grandma Henley loved lilacs. Lilacs are violet.

Grandma passed in the spring of 1964. I picked a huge bouquet of lilacs and laid it on her grave. Sixty years later, I still miss my Grandma Henley. But her spirit remains when, come spring, I pause beside a lilac bush.

Violet paint was created out of frustration. During the 1800s, artists stored their paints in strips of pigs’ bladders. They had to pierce the skin with a tack, squeeze the paint through the hole, and mend it with a needle thread with darning string. Even worse, the bladders often burst.

The artist John Goffe Rand was a rather impatient fellow. He preferred painting to puncturing. So in 1841, he patented a collapsible tube constructed of tin and sealed with pliers. With that dozens of dazzling new pigments were created to fill the tubes. Violet was one.

Violet was the first opaque, pure, affordable mauve-colored pigment. Before violet was invented by European chemists in 1860, artists had to mix red and blue to create violet. After Rand’s avant-garde invention they could squeeze it straight out of a tube. Impressionist painters used the color violet so prolifically critics accused them of “violettomania.” Claude Monet, who was interested in exploring shadows with violet instead of black, deemed it a “wonder.”

Wonder.

That is a perfect word to describe my Grandma Henley and her passion for violet lilacs.

Mountain Moonlight

Judith Kolva, Artist