My Year of Pink
Updated with correct date for my show: please open this one instead
My love affair with the color pink started months before Barbie. It started with Valentines Day and an experiment playing with alcohol inks. As I said it was an experiment, so I had only bought three colors, three different shades of pink. And though I had no command of the medium, the phosphorescent colors produced were heart-poundingly bright. It was around that time I discovered that Pantone’s 2023 color of the year was Viva Magenta, a warm but vivid color similar to what I’d stumbled onto with the alcohol inks. A color crush was born.
I took my daughter shopping in Macy’s in NYC last spring and wound up buying myself a pink (p)leather jacket. I heard about an immersive Magentaverse show at Chelsea Market and went; I took a gummy and painted for hours on my iPad.
I bought ruby curtains for our guest room, and painted them too.
I bought pink tortoise-shell sunglasses, which began the mask I love to put on when I go out into the world.
It’s hard to explain a crush with this kind of hold on me. Midlife crisis, maybe? (Safer than an affair.) Or perhaps it was that red, which had been my previous favorite color (sweaters, coats, my living room sofa) had been co-opted by the MAGAverse. Maybe it was because it struck in winter, that grayist time of the year, and was an antidote. Then there was a sort of transgressiveness of liking pink, after growing up in the feminist movement — the kind of transgressiveness that Greta Gerwig demonstrated when taking on Barbie and collaborating with Mattel. I could like pink. There was nothing wrong with liking pink. Unless you were liking pink because of the Barbie movie.
There was one moment when my devotion to pink faltered. On our way in to see the Magentaverse, stopped briefly at the Lincoln Tunnel, my eye took in the Apple ad above the entrance.
“Hello yellow, goodbye magenta,” my husband deadpanned. On my way to the Magentaverse.
I held steadfast. But…
I do like yellow. Especially bright yellow. It has the verve of a red or a magenta. There is something really refreshing about lemons. And daisies. Pantone has selected a boring peach for its color of the year 2024. But maybe for me…
Ok, I’m calling it. Debbie’s color of the year 2024: Happy-Face Yellow. Because it’s happy and the world is bleak. Definitely NOT because of Apple. And because I’ve already bought everything magenta.
Mark your calendar for Sunday February January 14, 2 to 4 pm. I will be showing poster-size prints of my iPad art at Watchung Arts Center in Watchung, NJ, with my friend Janice Belove and in conjunction with a really big show by my friend Rochelle Rubin. More on that to come.
