I know it’s my all-time favorite Crayola color, a blue infused with white, a touch of red. I don’t know what a cornflower is, but from the name I imagine it to grow in wide fields somewhere in the vicinity of Iowa. I picture it to be small with wispy petals, blue-purple, and yellow eyes. Like purple aster. A poor man’s flower. An everyman’s flower.
Cornflower was the color I picked to paint a New Mexico sky. As a child I didn’t think “New Mexico sky” or “Washington, DC sky.” Sky was sky. There was no sense of this place or that place. I only knew where it was I came from — New Mexico dirt, scrub oak, piñon, extreme wind, extreme heat and cold, a crisp blue sky almost always.
Midnight Blue was my night sky color. Midnight. Crayola gave me the cues to know which colors to pick. Flesh. Pine Green, which I saved for piñon trees, but then the darker Forest Green was confusing; didn’t piñons grow in forests? I used Melon for fruit, Turquoise Blue for the bracelet on Grandma’s wrist.
I never understood the raw colors, Raw Sienna and Raw Umber. Why raw? They were shades of brown, and the browns threw me off the most. Sepia and Mahogany, even Maroon was a sort of brown.
But Cornflower, Cornflower didn’t give me any signals. Nothing but the color of the waxy crayon tip to tell me where to put it on my page. I was a tidy artist, one to stay inside the lines. Dad’s accounting sensibility rubbed off on me. He once put a drawing of mine into his briefcase and took it to work.
I colored to please my father, colored because I could produce something tidy, clean, literal at the end of the exercise. Something to march home and show: this is me, me being you, this is you.
Everything I know about Cornflower I learned by fifth grade. I learned it was good to be an enigma, something defiant of a label.
In the box of Crayola crayons, the big boxes with the colorful sticks laid out in rows, one row on top of another on top of another, the world was divided into clusters. My red tones here, my brown tones next, yellows and greens residing side by side. Blues were calm, Cerulean, Midnight Blue, its cousin Navy, Turquoise Blue almost too bright for its peer group.
But Cornflower, that amazing plant growing in the wide Iowa plains, Cornflower was the calmest of colors. Not a still sea with who knows what churning under the surface. Not a night where things might appear, vague and menacing. But a clear, crisp sky. A home, a place, a moment.
-from Topic post, WRITING TOPIC – EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT THE COLOR BURNT SIENNA…
redravine.wordpress.com 
Perfect!
This writing makes color so much more interesting than I had ever experienced it. Thank you.
Color as place…
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Doesn’t Cornflower just sound like it looks? It’s one of those words that is so down to earth. I like that as a kid you chose Cornflower for the New Mexico sky:
There was no sense of this place or that place. I only knew where it was I came from — New Mexico dirt, scrub oak, piñon, extreme wind, extreme heat and cold, a crisp blue sky almost always.
It is so true for that sky. And that we only know what we grow up with. Until we experience more of the world, more place. I was just struck by that. Cornflower blue.
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Cornflower and Midnight blue were my favorite colors for the sky, too. It was never royal blue or plain blue — they just didn’t seem right.
When I think of crayons and colors, I think of the smell of wax. Though we were warned as kids not to eat crayons (of course, it sounds like “duh” now, but back then, weren’t you just a little tempted to taste the colors and find out if they taste the way they look? :)), toxic crayon wax smelled friendly to me. So much that when I think about it, I feel comforted and safe as I did as a young girl immersed in her world of colors.
I can’t believe this is a practice piece. It’s really so beautiful and poetic. I wish I can write like you. 🙂
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Wonderfuly written, piece, yb. I must be an old guy, I don’t think they had invented this color of crayon when I was little. Or maybe it didn’t come in the 64-color box I had (with the little crayon sharpener in the back).
In looking for the origin of the term, I found this:
Cornflower blue is a shade of light blue with relatively little green compared to blue. It is one of the colors available in a Crayola crayon box. Cornflowers, (Centaurea cyanus) are among the few “blue” flowers that are truly blue, most “blue” flowers being blue-purple. The novelist Chuck Palahniuk has claimed that the color cornflower blue appears at least once in each of his books. Sometimes confused with Corn flour, a synonym abbreviation.
here:
http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Cornflower_blue/id/2014736
But if you showed me a color chart of blues I’m not sure I could pick out cornflower. See, I’m a guy: we only have about nine colors, anyway. Maybe ten, if you count gray.
*kidding, kidding!*
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ben, that’s interesting about cornflower being a true color of blue with less green. I like the Chuck Palahniuk connection, too. It reminds of Alfred Hitchcock appearing at least once in all of his movies.
Liz, it was the smell that I was most drawn to as well. I don’t remember ever tasting a crayon. It just didn’t appeal to me. But to this day, when I smell one, it takes me back to my own little world.
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I liked the gentle execution of this piece. Must say it surprised me though to hear you were one who stayed inside the lines!
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Crayon wax smell…I love it. Elmer’s glue — yuck. I never could understand the kids who ate glue. Crayons I could understand.
Ben, thank you for the link to the cornflower description. When I did this practice, I honestly wasn’t sure if there were a flower called “cornflower.” Yet, in my imagination I held the image of a plant very much like what I now read it to be. Maybe I knew, subconciously, that cornflower was a flower.
In terms of color, you can click on the color chart to Crayon colors in Wikipedia (here’s the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Crayola_crayon_colors) to see what it shows for Cornflower. I have to say, my recollection of the color is that it’s a tad less bright, more on the gray-blue side or lavendar-blue side (much more blue than lavendar). But my memory is no more dependable than Wikipedia (and probably less).
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amuirin, it’s strange to think now that I was a kid who followed rules (coloring between the lines being one). My dad was strict, plus I was Catholic.
I once did this post about Staying in the Lines:
https://redravine.wordpress.com/2007/03/26/staying-between-the-lines/
One of the best things about getting older is that you pay less and less attention to the rules or rewrite them altogether.
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yb, I love this:
One of the best things about getting older is that you pay less and less attention to the rules or rewrite them altogether.
Let’s keep rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.
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Interesting; thanks for the chart. I recognize almost all the color names, but not cornflower blue. Hadn’t thought of silver or gold crayons for quite a while. Remember the little shiny flecks they had?
As a kid, those crayons seemed more valuable — like money.
Look at number 15, chartreuse. That isn’t what I thought chartreuse was, at all. They renamed it atomic tangerine.
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