Good coloring

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Probably we all had at least one teacher whom we detested, and who detested us. Mine was Mrs. Velma Himmler, back in the second grade. (I’ve changed her name, fairly obviously.) She was short, and dyspeptic, and mostly angry all the time. I was very timid. We were like matter and antimatter.

Second grade was pretty awful for me. But this most of all stands out in my mind: Velma Himmler let me know in no uncertain terms that I didn’t color pictures correctly. I left white space between the horizon and the blue sky. Velma Himmler told me that this was incorrect and unnatural, and that my coloring was substandard.

I knew, even at the age of seven, that she was full of shit. For one thing, we were in the Pacific Northwest, where there was often a soft layer of white cloud between the horizon and the blue sky (when we were lucky enough to have a blue sky).

And also, more importantly: who the hell was Velma Himmler to tell me how to color my pictures?

Coloring, for children, is a perfectly uninhibited activity. You color what you want, the way you want. Zigzags? Perfect. Solid colors? Also perfect.

Then you get to school, and you discover that there’s a correct way to color your pictures.

I never thought of myself as an artist, so I didn’t take Mrs. Himmler’s criticism very seriously (though I’ve obviously remembered it after all these years).

But later I took up crossstitch. When I was in Morocco, I copied and improvised patterns that I saw in the local rugs – called “kilims” – and did them as crossstitch. I gave all my work away, so I can’t show you any samples, but I can tell you that they were lovely. They used every color. They were geometrical representations of fish, and people, and abstract shapes, just like the original kilims I was copying, and I was able to use all of the psychedelic colors of thread I’d bought over the years.

Good coloring? There’s no such thing. There are all the colors of the rainbow, and more. And shapes.

Kids: when you make art, use all the colors and shapes you know.

Use all of them.

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