Cheney & Company - 2001 Calendar

Cheney & Company 2001 Calendar

January 2001
Dear Friends,

Clovis stalks the gray squirrel across July's green grass. I am observing his technique from the second-floor office that used to be my daughter's bedroom. When we moved here in the '70s, the room was papered with a gigantic psychedelic 7-Up bottle with butterfly wings that grew out and up onto the ceiling in violently bright repercussive hues.

Things are calmer now, and in the peacefulness of the made-over soft Mediterranean green room, I am able to concentrate on the progress of the determined feline hunter. He has flattened his ears and lowered his chassis, inching forward, snakelike, toward his unsuspecting prey. Clovis has, essentially, disappeared. Except for one thing. He is a marmalade tabby, and the contrast of his golden orange stripes against the verdant lawn broadcasts his whereabouts in a hilarious mocking of camouflage.

This backyard charade was the inspiration for our 2001 calendar, and I have tried with difficulty to give full expression to the meaning of color in words. Color is physics; Sir Isaac Newton's prism research dates back to 1676. Color is physiology; that oblivious rodent scampering in the yard is dichromatic (red-green color blind). Color is emotion; we can be green with envy, red-cheeked with embarrassment or suffer from the blues.

Color is music and mood: "Over the Rainbow," "Blue Suede Shoes," "The Yellow Rose of Texas," "Purple Rain," "That Old Black Magic." Color is powerful cultural and commercial branding: Old Glory's red, white and blue, Harvard's crimson and FedEx's purple and orange. IBM pink? Unthinkable. And color is personality and art; the artist's vision interpreted through pigments, inks and dyes. Color is everywhere. We can't seem to get enough color.

It amazes me to think that TV wasn't even around when I was born, and just in black and white during my childhood. Print, too, was predominantly black and white. According to Ken Charbonneau of Benjamin Moore and Co., "Ideas about color rarely strayed across national and regional boundaries. That all changed in the 1960s, a decade that brought forth a color explosion—a veritable chain reaction that continues to this day." This explosion was depicted so well in Pleasantville. In this wonderful movie the loss of innocence and the battle against conformity in personal expression is symbolized in a bland, monochromatic 50s sit-com society that panics when confronted by the passion, volatility and imperfection of a world rendered in brilliant living color.

VM+SD magazine, a trade publication for the retail display industry, forecasts that the wave of the future "is the use of light-transmitted colors. New technology allows designers to place color washes anywhere with easily changeable gels..." During the dark winter months, we could warm things up with a few halos of Clovis's orange tail rings. In the summer, we might cut the air conditioning bills by suffusing our houses and offices with cool blues and lavenders.

Let us consider the eloquent words of the expert. The great theorist Johannes Itten says in his The Elements of Color:

"Color is life; for a world without colors appears to us as dead. Colors are primordial ideas, children of the aboriginal colorless light and its counterpart, colorless darkness. As flame begets light, so light engenders colors. Colors are the children of light, and light is their mother. Light, that first phenomenon of the world, reveals to us the spirit and living soul of the world through colors."

As this new century (and millennium) gets under way, I wish your lives to be deeply touched every day by the complex and mysterious experience of color that illuminates the living soul of the world.

Peace be with you.

Carol L. Cheney

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Clovis