Today is Valentine’s Day and I should post pictures of red flowers on the BLOG; but, as the saying goes, “been there, done that.” I have been thinking about color, especially red; and if you’ve seen the pictures on the Blog for the past couple of days, you’ll know I’m a sucker for red. Red draws me in... or out into the world to find a way to photograph it.

Today it wasn’t something red that got my attention. Against a clearing sky after the rain we had last night and this morning, something that had no color at all caught my eye. I suppose I’m wrong about “no color at all.” Apparently, whether or not black is a color depends on whom you ask. A physicist would say, “In terms of color as light, black is the absence of color, while white is a mixture of all colors.” An artist would say, “In terms of pigment, white is the absence of color, while black is a mixture of all colors.” If you ask a child, he will say black is a color because his box of crayons has a black one in it.

So... I went off on a tangent and took my camera with me. There is something lyrical about the bare black branches curling against the blue sky with it’s wispy whitish clouds. That’s my picture for the day. Just for the heck of it, I’ve included in the BLOG a painting from the San Diego Museum of Art done by American Artist Janet Sobel sometime between 1946 and 1948. The piece is untitled, so I don’t know what she was trying to say. Red and black were definitely on her mind.

Whenever I think of black and white in the natural world, I usually think of zebras; so I went to the zoo to take a closer look. When you look at zebras closely, it’s clear that they aren’t just black with white stripes or white with black stripes. The wonderful design scheme for these animals includes some other colors subtly applied. So... I played around with the zebra images and included them on today’s posting on the BLOG.

And because It’s Valentine’s Day, I’ve included one bright red hyacinth. The dictionary says about hyacinths what everybody already knows: “the hyacinth is a bulbous plant of the lily family, with straplike leaves and a compact spike of bell-shaped fragrant flowers. Native to western Asia, hyacinths are cultivated outdoors and as houseplants.” The dictionary also reminded me that hyacinth is a color itself... and as a color it isn’t a shade of red.