blue diamond mines

“In the mines, in the mines,
In the Blue Diamond mines,
Ive worked my life away.
In the mines, in the mines,
In the Blue Diamond mines,
Oh, fall on your knees and pray.”

—fromBlue Diamond Mines by Jean Ritchie, 1964.

color blind

“You must be color blind, his mother told him.

He looked at the box of water colors: alizarin, vermillion, yellow, ultramarine, cobalt, blue green, yellow green, black, white, brown, orange.

It was tantalizing. He could see every color there. He knew every shade of difference between those colors. He looked about at the trees out on the street, at the color of the sidewalks, at houses. No inflection of color escaped him. He recognized every one. He wasnt color blind, he knew he wasnt. But he couldnt name those colors. Why hadnt he got a set that had names beside each colour . . .”

—Julian Lee Rayford, from Cottonmouth, 1941.

beat the whites with the red wedge

To beat the whites with the red wedge is not only to win the Civil War, improve the economy, and build collectivism; it is also to force the wedge into all the white zones of experience. . . . the closed, all-enveloping roundness of white investment must everywhere be opened and pierced by red sharpness.

—Jean-Franois Lyotard, celebrating the famous 1919 poster by El Lissitzky. Translated by Yve-Alain Bois in El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility, Art in America, April 1988.

karat.

1 : a unit of fineness for gold equal to 1/24 part of pure gold in an alloy.

—MerriamWebster Online Dictionary.

carat.

1 : variant of KARAT.

2 : a unit of weight for precious stones equal to 200 milligrams.

—MerriamWebster Online Dictionary.

carrot.

1 : a biennial herb . . . with a usually orange spindle-shaped edible root; also : its root.

—MerriamWebster Online Dictionary.

great diamonds

“Some folks say that once in a while youll find a coral snake in there, he glistening magic in his yellow and vermillion stripes, lying there near your foot like a thing bewitched, the fatal spell of his fangs in his wonderful color: cute thing, pretty little yellow and vermillion snake. Those rattlers in the swamps are of wonderful coloration: white, black, yellow, orange, red, blue, in great diamonds. Not like desert rattlers, dry, dusty in color, but moist in color, refulgent in color.”

—Julian Lee Rayford, from Cottonmouth, 1941.

that tawny river

“Mobile lies beside that tawny river. Swamps lie along that golden-red muddy-green-yellow river. Swamps as individual, each one, as the people on their outskirts.”

—Julian Lee Rayford, the opening lines of Cottonmouth, 1941.

red, white, and blue

“At first I painted a horses [bone] head and then I got this cows head, and I had this cows head painted against the blue . . . and I thought, well I have to do something else about that. And that was at the time that the men were all talking about the great American novel, the great American play, the great American, oh, it was the great American everything. . . .

So I thought Ill make my picture a red, white, and blue (laughs), Ill make it an American painting. . . . I put a red stripe down each side. It entertained me, but I dont think anybody else caught on to it for quite a while.”

—Georgia O’Keeffe, from the documentary Georgia O’Keeffe, (60 min), 1977.

lavenders green

“Lavenders blue, dilly dilly,
Lavenders green,
When you are King, dilly dilly,
I shall be Queen.”

—Traditional English, Lavenders Blue, from Lullabies and Poems for Children, selected and edited by Diana Secker Larson, 2002.