Summary # 5 – Color Walking by Phia Bennin and Brendan McMullan

This image depicts the Color Walking Bennin and McMullan experienced in life's surroundings.
This image depicts the Color Walking Bennin and McMullan experienced in life’s surroundings. (antiel_eldar/flickr/CC-BY-2.0)

As these two authors Phia Bennin and Brendan McMullan were working on a Colors show, they decided to experience what is called Color Walking. The person that helped his students with color walking was William Burroughs. The color walking is really only when you leave your house or immediately when you go out, you just pick a color that attracts your eyes and watch how all the colors jump out to you as you see different things as you go. As Bennin and McMullan said it could be the color red seen on different objects, so could the color yellow for example being the Sun, a lemon, yellow in a rainbow, yellow buses, bananas, and more. (1)

Bennin and McMullan went crazy on this Color Walk they did. They talked about how they would see “a woman’s lavender hand bag might draw us to the right; a yellow cab could pull us down a side street; a green pistachio ice cream cone could shove us into the park.” (Bennin & McMullan) They started their journey of Color Walking at WNYC, Manhattan on a Sunday afternoon. They started with blues, which made itself to pink, then grabbing their attention to violets. By the time they were ending the Color Walk, as it was becoming the end of the day, they saw how the entire space of earth is flooded with all colors. They ended with seeing “rusty orange of a rooftop water tower in the sun, a bright blue mohawk, and the humble yellowy greens of a new leaf all jumped into our eyes.” (Bennin & McMullan) (1)

Bennin and McMullan said if any person would like to experiment with this type of phenomenon that they encountered, then they should take the advice they say of having at least one hour where you have nothing to do, where you do not have anything on your schedule or anything that interrupts the time you have for this, only to have that hour to just use your eyes; to choose a color or one that makes your heart pop out of excitement if you do not know which color to choose; and finally if you get lost at a certain point in this process, then to choose a different color, and if you really get lost then that is the way to go, that is what is supposed to happen in Color Walking. (2)

Color Walking in this summary in a definition would be: to use a time of the day where one is not busy to find time to go insane with colors on all objects including: people, clothes, houses, cars, toys, sidewalks, the sky, just about anything you can see as you leave your house or wherever you may be. It can be at any location, any place, really any time of the day to Color Walk, but at night it could be harder because of the darkness. Color Walking is something anyone can do.

 

Bennin, Phia and McMullan Brendan. “Color Walking.” RadioLab. WNYC Radio, 29 June 2012. Web. 4 March 2016.

 

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