COLOR MY WORLD
by Bryce Martin

Having a passion for colors, I am constantly being seduced by their endless variations and combinations. From an early age, I was hooked by the tones and hues from the labels of my stacks of 45 rpm vinyl records, and even drawn in by the individual diskettes from a tubular pack of Necco wafers. Some of the best appear when you are least expecting. Earlier in the week, for example, I glanced up from some reading just as a blast of beautiful colors on the televison screen froze my gaze. They were vivid and vibrant, a freshness of color and quality of detail out of the ordinary. A man on Antiques Roadshow had several old empty canned food tins he found after excavating an old building. They were all from the same "find." One had a date of 1876. No one on the show recalled ever seeing such cans. The men who built the structure had tossed their food cans after group lunches. They had dined in what would become the building's crawl space. The owner of the treasures said the cans discarded in the dirt had rust. Those tossed on wood chips were in mostly mint condition. The can's labels are what makes them valuable. These labels were chromolithographs. This process, now a lost art, is what produced the spectacular colors. Modern day dot-pattern photograph printing processes are artless in comparison. Though the labels depicting salmon and green beans are ephemera, and, as such, count as advertising or commercial art, they looked like fine art to me.

TODAY'S FOLKSY EXPRESSION OVERHEARD: "She wasn't wearing enough clothes to flag a handcar."
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