Wild, brilliant colour is rocking my concrete-grey foundations

Modern science calls it bunk but I am fully on board with chromotherapy, an alternative medicine branded by the labcoats as a pseudo-science. The preferred term is photobiology now, an acknowledged science that includes the indisputable benefits of light therapy. I prefer the more mystical “chromotherapy” because it’s less about rational explanations and more about feeling. And, for the synaesthesiasts (more specifically, those of us who experience chromesthesia), the beautiful music.

Consider these accompanying images from southern Mexico. Bask in the warmth of these visual fields of wild, intense, unrestrained, unleashed colour jumping out of our monochromatic devices.

Still in my first couple of weeks here in the Yucatan, I am bobbing around the crowded city streets, slack-jawed at what just may be the direct opposite palette of a Vancouver B-Line bus on any given November rush hour. My outlook has shifted from a low-level, gunmetal-grey resignation to a hot-fuchsia/blood-orange exhilarating mixto, all from looking at the zipper selection in a notions shop (of which there are plenty and another reason for exhilaration), or a glimpse into a hot-pink and aquamarine courtyard restaurant.

But it’s not all feel-good. I am seduced by vibrant art and I use it to seduce in my own making: first the beauty, then the crack in the beauty. It’s working when I think, “This is pretty and pretty horrifying.”

If colour didn’t entice then Walt Disney could have saved himself the price of acres of paint and Disneyland would be just metal and asphalt. The superstore cereal aisles would look like a newspaper periodicals library. You get the monochromatic picture.

Colour is a social statement in the bright, face-framing embroidered embellishments around a huipil (blouse) worn by mainly older women, or the brilliant woven blanket hanging from a balcony of a colonial facade. There is some needling in all that needlework, but without the dazzling hues we might not clue into the significance.