Pink

Text reads as (from left to right): Far back into my memory pink has been so, so, so soft and vulnerable and intimate and vulnerable and intimate and soft … no, no, no, not me!  This year I am working daily in a personal and stable environment of women artists and am becoming less defensive.  I am beginning to see those aspects of me that are soft and vulnerable and intimate and beginning to say yes, yes, yes me!  W.dam’s

When I was a little girl I was dressed up in pink dresses and my room was pink and so I learned that dirt really shows up on pink!

I think pink is a pretty color.  Pink is not for boys because they wear, like dark colors.  I think pink is a pretty color for babies because it makes the baby look gentle and cuddly.  Pink is pretty for spring and summer.  I don’t like pink becauseit gets dirty fast and stained.  It gets dirty faster than most colors.  On a girl pink looks dainty, and on a boy it looks faggy.   Sara, 13 – Rhema, 14 – Edith, 15 – Evelyn, 13

Pink is the color my mother wished for me, thinking it sweet, thinking it pure, thinking it all things not violent or cruel.  She did not notice, hidden in the heart of the sweetheart roses, the seed of blood deepening into crimson.  In the blink of an eye we pass through the spectrum, shedding colors and images.  No destination is possible; there is only the movement from one point to another; there is only the journey.  And no time is wasted, no time is lost.  We are all all those moments, even that time long ago when we were our mothers’ daughters, pink pearls.

When I was a kid I shared a room with my sister and my mother painted all the walls pink, and put the same color pink bedspreads on our beds and on the windows, she put pink curtains.  At that same time she had a baby girl…My sister and I got moved out and the baby got the pink room.   Edie Hopkins

Pink is the color of hair rollers and the tape which holds hair in place.  This is the pink that is assigned to little girls and is for me all that I wanted to be and was not – sweet, proper, nice and obedient. Red yells and screams for attention; it is too much.  I want attention, but… being neither a sweet little thing nor a ravishing trollop, neither pink nor red has pertained to me.  I am embarrassed that I ever tried to be the pink I was supposed to be.  Seeing myself frowning from beneath a head full of pink rollers, my dark hair never calmly, sweetly, obediently wrapping itself.

Pink is a color which I felt had nothing to do with me.  I’ve never felt I could be pink, or even “in the pink”.  As a little girl I was pale – not pink-cheeked pale – and I frowned and was called pickle face.  I never looked right in pink – as a girl I preferred grey, as a young woman, black.  Now, I prefer the gentle off colors Caledon green and pink/peach.  This yellowed pink is slightly old looking, experienced, even used.  It is more subtle than baby pink, has more confused connotations – somewhat thirties.  I like the lack of clarity in such a peachy pink – it doesn’t mean as many specific things as ‘baby pink’.

Scratch pink and it bleeds.

Little girls don’t know why, but little girls are pink.

Pink is my Anne – Renoir rosy, Cassatt bright…from birth a pink glow of health, happiness and heart has walked with this child…now an eleven year old young woman, she has embraced that rose glow and made it hers…she casts it in soft baby shades of pink, warm folds of rose, sharp insights of red, loud protests of shocking pink…she sees this world very clearly…and easily shakes loose into orange, yellow, green blue, purple, black and brown to claim what is hers…still glowing.

One of my many associations with the color pink is that of the panties my mother purchased in preparation of a new school year (in large quantities) and even if they weren’t always pink and lace trimmed, they almost always were adorned with those small appliqued flowers.

Can be the printed roses on dinner invitations.  Can be the shining new scar from a partially healed wound. I have always loved pink because it’s a hidden color, most people think of it as a dainty quiet color, but it has the power to wound and destroy in it as well. Can be the burning beam from a ruby laser to sear your eyes out.  Can be the glow in-the-dark shock of midriff blouses sold in stores around 14^th street.

We did not choose pink. Pink is the color they gave to use.  You know who they are – the infantilizers, the exploiters, the sexists, the woman haters.  Pink is the color of curlers, dollhouses, deodorants, girdles, baby talk, Pablum, Sadie Hawkins, playpens, girlie shows.  Pink is a jail.  But woman is strong, authentic, honest, open, collective, non-hierarchical, complex, intense, cooperative, energetic, passionate, intuitive, skillful, nurturing, loving, enthusiastic, brave. Now we make the world in our own image.  We build our own institutions.  We love each other.  We destroy war.  We destroy pink.  We take every color in the universe as ours.  Every color is ours.  Every color is ours.  Every color is ours.  Yes, yes every color is ours.  Yes yes yes yes.   Deena

I had always hated pink and felt both proud and apologetic for my almost too definite associations with the color.  Most of them are culturally determined and common.  Pink represents impotency, all that girls can’t do because they wear pink or behave gracefully passively.  Pink wraps the princess who can’t wake up.  Powder pink is the dust of fakery, trying to make it come true in front of lavatory mirrors – sad at failing and embarrassed at having tried.  Pink is the color for women exposed and lying down, wearing shoes with pompoms.  Yet a woman seems more naked in pink underwear, partially hidden behind some gauzy, filmy thing.  Sometimes, going in the opposite direction, pink stands for piling up instead of stripping away:  the pink of confection, ribbons, hair spray, candied roses.  But even then, woman is somehow marked as available and therefore exposed.  Behind all of these associations is my sense that to be in pink is to be without recourse:  I see women caught in their graceful poses:  Venus in the too smooth, pink shell.  Although today it often seems important to embrace the conventionally feminine, I as yet am unable to prize pink because of its associations with hope, tenderness, innocence, and perhaps even languor and fantasy.

Bazooka bubble gum that makes your throat sore when you first chew it because it’s so sickeningly sweet

Pinkos are anemic; oh so shrimpy and underdeveloped, but if I clench my fist and PUSH, (maybe) I’ll grow up to be a REGULAR RED.  (rah!)

SOFT INSIDE PINK FLESH VULNERABLE

Pink Sweater.  My mother gave me a soft, fuzzy pink sweater.  As a young girl, I hated pink.  Pink is frivolous – not me – I won’t wear it.  For our recital, the girls wore pink tu-tus.  I alone wore startling black.  As an art student in college, I painted peach. (I loved delicate, pale color…camellias.)  He told me, “You look great in pink.  That’s your color.  It makes your face rosy and hair dark.  I love you in pink.”  I was wearing the pink sweater the night he drove me to the hospital.  I was hemorrhaging heavily following an illegal abortion.  Women’s building – I never expected to find pink saws, hammers, hearts on the tool room door.  I too donned fleshy pink socks and the pink sweater once again.  Pink – feminine sensitive, feminine strong, intense, sensuous, humorous, bold, lively, O.K.

I’ve never thought of pink as a faded red, but a blush of some paler cream or stone white the tint has many many associations, warm and soft, childlike, very clean and girlish – but also pink is the color of the reclamation of my womanhood – by myself, for myself – not merged with the masculine blue, creating passion rather a self-appreciation, plain, not bleached by the drain of the world’s demands, but intact.

Pink.  Pink is a very elegant color, a color for dainty girls.  Pink is for Valentine’s Day, and for ribbons in curls.  Pink isn’t for boys or their playing, the color of pink is used mostly in saying…I LUV YOU!!!

Pink is for infants and old ladies with silver hair.  Pink is infancy and old age. Pink is not for grown-up responsible people.  Pink is innocent and helpless.

Pink is childish.  I’m not pink now.

Candy cotton sweet.  My bed that my mother painted PINK.  Pink and feminine that I eventually wasn’t.  My first real party dress, pink chiffon which I wore with my first high heels.  And then I HATED PINK.  Now pink has become a symbol of liberation for me.  Liberation from all the stereotypical little girl things.

I have four tubes of rough.  One is pale sugary pink that turns dark pink on my face.  One is dark rose that I use to create hollows under my cheek bones.  One is pale transparent pink that hardly shows at all.  One is intense strawberry scarlet that makes my cheeks look like they just got slapped.

Pink is strong.  Pink is pink.  Pink is not like anything.  Pink is pink.