Color Walking”

“Color Walking”, is an article written by Phia Bennin and Brendan Mcmullan on June 29, 2012. In the beginning of the article, they talk about a tool dreamed up by Williams Burroughs to inspire his students. It involved the process of just walking out of the door, picking a color that catches your eye and while you walk just notice the objects that you come across with that same color; red bicyclist’s shorts, woman’s sunburned shoulders, and the paint on a fire hydrant. See simple enough right.

They even decided to go a little further by using more than one color and letting your eyes bounce from object to object, color to color. They began their walk in WNYC, located in lower Manhattan. They started their walk out the revolving doors introducing their eyes to their first color, blue, which led them to a woman wearing a scarf, then a girl with chipped nail polish, which then almost led then on the subway but being distracted by the blues led them in another way, on the blue basketball courts. After being distracted by the blues and basketball, they started on their second color, somehow they set their eyes on purple and not long after pink, a purple shirt drew them in first, worn by someone with sparkly eyes, which led them to leopard legs and then leopard legs and “legalize gay”  at an outdoor café, a man in pink. This walk lasted them from 4:09p.m. to 4:23p.m.

They talk about how they walked away from the experiment not only seeing the colors of the world but being able to acknowledge the colors in all forms.

The article wraps up by them giving advice on how to perform a color walk on our own. Being sure to let us know to give ourselves an hour of uninterrupted time, no plans, disruptions commute or errands just strictly eye time. Then once we have time cut out to experiment, we should pick a color or maybe even let the color jump out to our eyes and choose us.  The final advice and key to this experiment was, if we get lost, to choose another color, and if we get really lost, we will know that we are on the right track.

I realized how useful and important it is to sometimes just turn our brains and cell phones off and just pay attention to the world. A lot of times if you walk downtown or are just outside, if you pay attention, you will see that many people who are in passing seem to do so while on their phones, sometimes keeping their heads down the entire time, blocking out their surroundings.

As I read the comments, as  I usually do, I noticed someone stated that children do this all the time through a game called I-spy. I am sure many of us are familiar with this game, in which a child fixes their eyes on an color and object and says “I spy with my little eye…”. Even though children will think nothing of it, that game is teaching them to be alert, to pay attention to detail and allowing them to see the world for all that it is. And as an adult, I actually love the idea of a color walk because it is something simple and easy to do, but brings a lot of perspective about the world we live in. after all, color is perceptive, which is also know to bring forth emotions. We have to start “seeing” the world in color, through a new perspective than the one were used to , before we can enjoy the world and all the differences and emotions these colors bring forth.