Free The Colorman by Erika Wood

her daze and she grabbed the phone.
    The little green screen on the phone read a familiar number and Rain purposefully plastered a smile on her face as she answered it, “I’m on my way! I’ll be right there…”
    She listened.
    â€œWhat happened?”
    Listened.
    â€œWhen?”
    Listened.
    â€œWell, what did they say?”
    Listened.
    â€œHow long?”
    Listened.
    â€œI’m coming. Which hospital?”
    Listened.
    â€œSit tight, Gwen, I’ll be right there. Do you need anything?”

BLUE
No ocean deep could hold this sorrow No midnight sky could wear this hue I bow my head, pray for tomorrow and I cry the deepest blue.
    â€”A L H EMBERGER
    W hile “the blues” is probably the most easily identified color emotion, blue in art can often have the opposite effect. It can burst from the canvas in a clean field of beauty. Blue is, of course, the heavens, but it is also the well-established color of the Virgin Mother and all of the purity and innocence that she embodies. In language, blue has its connotations of innocence. A reliable friend is true blue. A flash of innocent eyes are baby blues, since babies’ blue eyes might only last a couple of months before they go green or gray or brown. So blue is innocent, genuine, holy and clean, but also dark, depressed and violent.
    Blue has had one of the most dramatic of histories in art materials. Egyptian blue, which kept the murals in Pompeii grand and bright over millennia, was made from a simple enough recipe of copper, calcium, sand and salt, heated to 830 degrees Fahrenheit. The all-important specific methods of its preparation were lost some time between 200 and 700 C.E. However, once discovered, other blues took its place. The blue of the Madonna’s robes in all the most spectacular frescoes in Italy is the precious crushed lapis, Ultramarine. Extreme blue. Lapis lazuli is a beautiful stone, streaked and mottled with gold. While this works to advantage in jewels, bringing a complementary depth and glint to the stone, in paint, that silica will dull the blue. In 1437, Cennino Cennini, the Plato of art materials, described the method for purifying Ultramarine: the powdered lapis should be kneaded under a weak lye solution in a dough of wax, pine rosin, linseed oil and gum mastic. The dough hangs on to the silica, the calcite and the pyrite of the beautiful gold streaks, while the purest blue particles settle out in the solution.
    Yves Klein eventually demonstrated that there was a blue bluer than blue, but his was more a method than a new hue; pure Ultramarine in a resin medium of his invention which avoids the previously inevitable contamination of the pigment by its supporting oil, egg or glue. There are, of course, dozens of distinct blues we can identify, though many artists create them from nothing more than one good Ultramarine combined with whites and breaths of other tones to pul from it. A standard palette will include at least two blues, the cooler Ultramarine and perhaps a Cerulean, the warm, greenish blue made from cobaltous chloride and potassium stannate. Combined with silica and calcium sulphate, washed and heated, it becomes the only blue without any violet, and thus an important player on any palette.
    Lucy Wilkinson enjoyed her body more and more as she aged. Turning fifty that year had been strangely liberating. Strange only since she’d been so unhappy at the turning of her last two decade markers, both occasions having been the crux of one crisis or another. The birth of her son on the first and the devastating split of her third marriage on the second. But now, stretching out on her lover’s empty bed in his quaint Hudson River house, she thought she must finally have gotten this thing right. She even suspected there was a little bit of the masculine sense of freedom and, bien sûr , an ultimately Buddhist spirit of non-ownership in her relationship with James Morrow. The things that