Camille, my painting teacher, says, “Never use black — you can get a much livelier color by mixing French Ultramarine and Burnt Sienna.” She’s right — I drip water from my brush onto the dark blue watercolor pan to moisten it, then dab the thick dark mix into one of the little hollows in my white palette — I am painting dried milkweed pods, I need a lot of gray, so I wet and dab the blue, five or six good brush loads. Then I dip the brush in water to clean it, and add more water to the blue until it livens up and shimmers.
Rinse my brush again and dab it into Burnt Sienna. I love Burnt Sienna. When I was six, I called it “squirrel brown” — that reddy-brown, more the color of illustrations of squirrels in books, not the actual color of my Ohio squirrels, drab tipped with silver.
Maybe in third grade Burnt Sienna showed up in the crayon box, maybe that year we had twenty-four crayons in our boxes, three tiers of eight. By then I had heard of St. Catherine of Sienna, who was supposed to be a saint with a sense of humor — I knew Sienna was a town somewhere, I saw it made of clay houses rising in tiers like the crayons in the box, layers of browny-red or reddy-brown houses, St. Catherine laughing — a good color, Burnt Sienna.
I load my wet brush with paint, and dabble the reddy-brown onto the rim of the hollow where my French Ultramarine swims — it could be the sea, maybe if I were a seagull riding the air, looking down on the sea off Marseilles, off the Cote d’Azur — ultramarine, the most sea-ish of the blues.
I let the Burnt Sienna sit there on the rim, and dip some water into it. The browny-red loosens up — as the color diffuses, I see again the delicate transparency of watercolor.
I begin to dribble the light red-brown into the darker blue.
The colors blend. Black forms, then softens, its intensity relaxes —the separate colors lose their distinction. I know my thick creamy watercolor paper will take this new color and play with it, and I will see gradations of grey, some parts bluer, some parts browner.
I look at the back of the milkweed pod with its hundreds of shades of grey, its subtle striations. The pod is dark beneath the least bit of silvery silky furriness. It is curved like a whale, tapered like an elf’s cap, warty as an old tree trunk. Its seams have the slightest borders, rims of darker brown. Each bump, each curve, has its contrasting darks and lights.
I have fallen in love with the milkweed pod, and my grey is lively and waiting.
