Colors: keen on peach

Saint-Prex, Switzerland, newly painted building

A lovely thing happened over the weekend: I was invited to join a Flickr group that posts photos featuring the color peach (check out link in title).

It has always been one of my favorite colors, but actively seeking it out in order to share photos has turned out to be a great exercise for training the eye to better "see" colors. I was astonished to realize how little peach there is in our (northern) lives in February, when fruit and vegetables and flowers offer us almost no glimpses of this color.

I turned to a new building in our village and played with light, shadow, form, contrast and texture to see which most enriches peach, the color.

I compared it to one of my favorite roses, a peach-to-orange one that blooms from July to October in the Swiss Alps. Nature's version of the color is still richer, and has a shade more pink, but next summer, if I compare the building to the apricots in the Valais, where they grow in abundance, I suspect the building will seem more pink. Color boundaries are as arbitrary and difficult to maintain as those of nations.