Infinite Color

Margo and I stopped by the local hardware store to pick up paint samples this afternoon. Yep, we're just about ready to start painting the inside of our home. The previous owners left most of the walls white, so it's kind of a blank slate. The two rooms that did get color aren't quite what we'd like (which is a real shame, because the living room is done entirely in a faux finish that probably would look great with different furniture).

We left the store with an amazing stack of paint chips to consider. We tried to limit our selections to colors that we think will work in some of the different rooms the way we see them -- golds, greens, eggplant, copper, etc. -- but there are still so many choices.

I found myself thinking about just how amazing God's artistry is. There really isan infinite variety of colors in this world! Most of us try to categorize that limitless selection with words like "orange" or "purple" or "brown." The poor guys working at the paint factory have to be more creative because they're more in touch with the ininity of the spectrum, so they come up with phrases like "spiced pumpkin" or "royal velvet" or "chocolate silk." But even that's not enough.

When I was an Art major -- many, many years ago -- I took a class in color theory. (Yes, I'm sure that's part of why I'm a visual perfectionistic snob. Shush...) One day the instructor came up with a curious assignment: We were told to browse through magazines and cut out one-inch squares of color that we thought represented the purest diversity of the color wheel -- red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Now, there's a science involved in that, because the final results would be perfectly arranged across from each other with exactly the right differentiation as you moved around the wheel. It took me hours to cut out 6 little squares! Then, once we had them pasted onto a board in the shape of our color wheel, the instructor gave us the real zinger: we then had to mix paint to perfectly match the colors we had selected. The assignment quickly moved from the infinite spectrum of visible light to the infinite possibilities of paint and pigment. You can't imagine how tedious it was to take a bunch of tubes of colored acrylic and pull out one or two drops at a time from various colors to arrive at an exact match.

And all of that infinite, colorful diversity exists simply because our infinite, artistic Creator spoke the words, "Let there be light!" He looked at it and called it "good." Personally, I think that's an understatement.