It is fitting that on Father's Day I found a t-shirt (which I bought) that is of a green so exact and evocative of a green t-shirt my father had from his time as a student in Chicago, which he later gave to me and which I wore until it was full of holes. It was incredibly soft, made even softer by the years of use and thinness it has acquired as a result.
We often think of smell or taste as the sense that most often acts as a catalyst for a nostalgia or recollection so vivid and visceral that it evades awareness or access, intellect or contemplation, or a considered approach to memory. I have had this experience most affectively through the happenstance collision of two smells that bind together: a certain kind of paper towel made of specific fibres and an equally specific soap, found always in a public bathroom. This olfactory combination takes me right back to the bathroom in my kindergarten, which I can still picture.
To have this Proustian experience not via smell or taste but rather, via colour, and then to consider this subsequently, further brings me back to being a scholar of art history, when I would not infrequently spend time thinking about colour intentionally, expansively, phenomenologically, aesthetically, politically, emotionally, and so on. I'm thinking of Malevich, Josef Albers, Marlow Moss, Agnes Martin - there are more.
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