COLORS: THE MUSIC OF THE EYES

Editor’s Note: In the final installment of our centennial salute, we present an essay by Jack Foster, who ranks as one of the very best writers we’ve ever published — he’s way up there. In this piece, he focuses on the colors around us, which he describes as being “the parched, muted, laid-back colors of the Southwest: gentle-on-the-eye colors, soft and subtle, mixed and hyphenated — lavender-brown, salmon-gray, beige-pink, terra-cotta, old-rose, tobacco-stained green.” When we first ran this in August 1980, a stream of letters poured in. “Usually your magazine provides a feast for the eyes with its superb photography, and the text takes second place,” Heidi Beck of Oakland wrote. “Not so with Colors: The Music of the Eyes. Never have I read, and re-read, a more exquisitely expressed piece of prose that complements the beautiful pictures to perfection.” Amen.

In his Journals, Delacroix says that colors are “the music of the eyes,” that they “combine like sounds” to produce harmonies rivaling those produced by great composers with great orchestras. Indeed, he says: “Certain color harmonies produce sensations that even music cannot achieve.”

Most Arizonans would agree with him. For they live inside a kaleidoscope. Everywhere they turn, they are surrounded by color. And with every tick and turn of the clock, their world of color shifts and changes, producing harmonies many people have never seen.

First, there are the basic colors of the land itself, the canvas, if you will, upon which Arizona’s other colors are placed.

The colors of this landscape have been baked and dried by the sun, then scattered over the ground like seed. The yellows have been ground into maize and sand, the reds into cayenne and rust. The purples have been smoked; the greens, charred; the oranges, burnt.

They are the colors of spices and nuts, oven-warm and aromatic — pecan, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, walnut, almond, mustard, hazel, curry, clove.

They are the used, faded, hand-me-down colors of worn leather jackets, old flannel shirts and scuffed boots.

They are the earthy colors of rough-cropped fields — of wheat and barley and sage, of tumbleweed and thistle and straw.

They are the animal colors — bone, bay, palomino, sorrel, camel, roan, chestnut, suede, buff, tawny, cordovan, tan.

There are exceptions, of course, but for the most part, the colors of Arizona’s landscape do not startle you with their brilliance. They awe you with their complexities — or, as Delacroix would put it, with their harmonies.

For they are not the pure, hard, sharp colors of the North, nor the thick, wet, glossy colors of the tropics. They are the parched, muted, laid-back colors of the Southwest: gentle-on-the-eye colors, soft and subtle, mixed and hyphenated — lavender-brown, salmon-gray, beige-pink, terra-cotta, old-rose, tobacco-stained green.

It is upon this canvas, a canvas that has been baked by centuries of dry heat and daylong brightness, that Nature has painted its Opus Arizonum.

You see it, unexpectedly but brilliantly, when spring comes to the desert. During most of the year, the desert is dry, barren, seemingly lifeless. Then, if the rains have been heavy and right, the sand and rocks, almost overnight, explode with life. It is as if someone had splattered the dry canvas with wet colors — Tamayo reds, Chagall blues, Van Gogh yellows, Utrillo whites — squinting-bright colors, colors so vibrant they seem to throb the pulse in the searing sunshine.
 

They come mostly, these day-glow colors, from the desert’s year-round residents — the cactuses. The prickly pear sprouts clusters of pinkish yellow, the beavertail of vermilion, the golf ball of orange-lavender. The saguaro holds bunches of lemon-filled white blossoms in every hand. The hedgehog serves up bowls of strawberries filled with honey. The barrel wears a crown of violet-red.

Playing accompaniment to the cactuses are the spring visitors — golden-peach mallows, yellow-dune primroses, lavender-blue lupines, pink and purple sand verbenas, orange-filled violet asters, golden spring poppies, blue dicks, red four-o’clocks, pinkish-white buckwheats and yellow brittlebushes.

It is truly “music to the eyes”; lyrical, joyous, spirited music; music from a Strauss waltz or an Offenbach operetta.

In the valleys like the Sedona and the Monument, the music becomes majestic. The low sun ignites the sandstone and Yei Bichei rocks, turning cliffs and towers and buttes into walls of flame. Their fire engulfs you with reds: heavy, dense reds — burgundy, scarlet, beet, crimson, ruby, oxblood, maroon. These are bass fiddle timpani reds; reds you can feel in your bones; immense, stone-deep reds that fill up your eyes and chisel a place in your brain.

In the canyons, these same reds blend with ochers and greens, with browns and purples, with yellows and creams and blacks and oranges and smoke-blues, to produce harmonies seen nowhere else in the world. And when these harmonies happen inside the most staggering tear in the surface of the Earth, amid miles of rock pillars and cathedrals and temples, they become more than visual. They become visceral, palpable, alive. They become a fugue more intricate than Bach’s, a symphony more profound than Beethoven’s.

They become visceral, palpable, alive. They become a fugue more intricate than Bach’s, a symphony more profound than Beethoven’s.

In the forests, more than in the deserts or the valleys or the canyons, you are assaulted by naturalness, by a sense of life and growth, by greenness. For here, a vast chorus of green sings. Each green has a different tone, and each tone changes, changes, constantly changes as the leaves play in the breeze. The scale on which this chorus sings contains every shade of green from black olive to golden lime — slate green, empire green, midnight green, holly, parsley, avocado, jade, mustard green, chartreuse.

And flowing around these green islands like gentle rivers are the high-country meadows, alive with wind-rippled wildflowers — June-blooming claret cups, golden poppies, orange Mexican poppies, red owl’s clover.

But, for all their beauty, it is not the landlocked colors that are Arizona’s most famous. The sunset colors are.

Perhaps it is the parched desert landscape they appear over that makes these sunsets seem so vivid. Perhaps it is the vast expanse of sky they appear in. Perhaps it is the airborne dust their rays shine through. Perhaps it is the low horizon they appear over. Perhaps it is the clouds they play in — the cumulus and altocumulus, the cirrus and altostratus. Or perhaps it is simply the long, low light itself, for, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning pointed out:

“Yes,” I answered you last night,
“No,” this morning, sir, I say;
Colors seen by candle-light
Will not look the same by day .
 

No matter the causes, really. Suffice to say, Arizona’s sunsets are among the most beautiful in the world. Indeed, many say they are the most beautiful that appear anywhere over land, producing sensations that even music cannot achieve.

And watching them is, indeed, more like listening to music than like looking at paintings or sculptures. For paintings and sculptures are static, moment-in-time, permanent works of art. And sunsets, like music, are transient works of art — moving and sequential, with beginnings and endings, flowing and building and changing from one movement to another.

But most music, you’ve heard before. So, what you’re listening to is, at most, a new performance of an old favorite. Not so with sunsets. Every night, there is a premiere performance of a totally new composition — original, full of beauty, never to be seen again.

Some nights, the colors are ominous, Wagnerian shouts of purple and crimson, claret and blood. The heavens thunder with majestic vaults of black, fire-tinged clouds, rolling and tumbling across an earthquake-yellow sky.

Other nights, Debussyan pastels perform — soft orchids and oranges, creamy yellows and pinks, gentle saffrons and corals, delicate lilacs and ivories; baby-blanket colors, politely changing places in a powder-blue room.

But the sunsets that stretch for miles across the heavens almost every night; the sunsets that make visitors stop and lean up against their cars to stare and wonder at; the sunsets that gather crowds at Hopi Point and Organ Pipe; the sunsets that fill up backyards in Tucson, patios in Flagstaff and high-rise balconies in Phoenix — these are the famous fruit-colored sunsets of Arizona.

So, along with the others, you watch them night after night, watch as the colors change — slowly, gradually, imperceptibly, like scenes in an animated slow-motion film — from lemon to peach to papaya to apricot to tangerine to mango to apple to strawberry to cherry to red raspberry to blueberry to plum.

And, as you watch, the colors meld and marry, producing moments of such ineffable harmony that even a Berlioz or a Rimsky-Korsakov would have to shake his head in amazement.

Moments when the sky is a whitewashed blue, and stupendous, heaven-touching billows of apricot clouds are reddened by strawberry.

Moments when the clouds string like ropes of cotton across a zenith-blue horizon, and the deep peach is lightened by lemon.

Moments when the soft, gray-blue sky is cobbled with clouds, and the plum is touched by mango.

And if you stay and watch after the sun has gone, as the crepuscular light seeps over the horizon, you can almost hear the huge, Rachmaninoff-esque chords dying in the distance, accompanying yet another Arizona day to its doom.

John Ruskin warned painters: “Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch that you add in other places, so that what was warm a minute ago became cold when you put a hotter color in another place, and what was harmony when you left it becomes discordant as you set other colors beside it.”

Certainly, that is true for canvas. But it isn’t for Arizona. There are no discordant scenes here. No matter how the evening sky changes its hues, no matter how the landscape mixes its colors or where it sets them, no matter how the springtime desert marries hots and colds, no matter how the valleys and canyons and forests arrange their palettes, Arizona’s colors always sing in harmony.