Color Theories

When Nick DeFord came to speak to the Tuesday Weavers, I felt like I'd been thirsty for weeks and was only given the dregs of a hot canteen.  Not because of the inadequacy of his talk, but my slowness to comprehend it.  He suggested many books, and brought some with him.  I immediately snatched up a book on Anni Albers' exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and went home to order Josef Albers' book, Interaction of Color.  They sit on my bed table, and when my mind is too clogged from the day, I pick one of them up to look at the pictures.  When I'm not as tired, I try to understand the text.  This morning, I have been thinking about the color that surrounds me, and have shared some of it with you.
  One of my pet peeves as a pastry chef has always been when people add mint to a dessert plate, to add "color."  Well, brown, the color of many, many pastries is a color, my friends!  It comes in about a zillion shades, too.  And one of my pastry heroes, Emily Luchetti said it best:  "Just because it exists in the universe doesn't mean it belongs on a plate."  Another hero and opponent of mint, Pierre Herme says that American pastry chefs suffer from "the malady of the mint leaf."  He, too, says that brown is a color, and that garnish on a plate should only reflect what is in the dessert.
  In an episode of WeaveCast, Alice Schlein says that she learned that peach is a neutral color.  Peach is my favorite color, though most friends would tell you that pink is, and I never thought of it as a neutral.  I simply adore it, and it makes me happy.
  One thing I didn't mean to find but did this morning in my walk through my yard and neighborhood was how many colors "go" with green.  It doesn't seem to clash with anything, as long as it's a flower, bud or seed pod.  Mom and I are going on a plant nursery field trip now, and I will be checking everywhere to make sure that's true.