our blue heaven
Color isn’t just a black and white affair. When it comes to hue and shade, New Mexico has the blues for brown.
This article first appeared in Autumn 2005 Su Casa
New Mexico has its own distinctive palette of color that changes as the fashion winds blow through our little corner of the earth. At times we spread our color formulas to the world at large, at other times we borrow from what comes our way. Regardless of which way the wind is blowing, the color sense of New Mexico has its own history and story, rooted, as it is, in this plot of earth.
Color, like smell and taste, has its own woefully inefficient and inadequate vocabulary. We can barely find the words to describe what we see in our color-filled natural world, and we must struggle even more to describe the new rainbows science created for us with the development of chemical dyes and pigments. The hues of nature are often called upon to help us out with this naming task, so we throw out phrases like “sky blue” or “mustard yellow” in hope that we all see and can agree upon the same sky and have in mind the same type of mustard.
Hopeless as this act of putting words to vision may be, what we experience in the refraction of light colors all that we do. Color can embody how we see not only what is before us, but also what is within us. Feeling blue, seeing red, a sunny disposition, green with envy, in the pink: our words try to paint a picture of our moods. These common phrases also signal how important color is to our sense of well-being. New Mexico, with its own palette and vocabulary of color, can make our home interiors and exteriors places that feel rooted to a long tradition of vernacular architecture and design, places that provide us with a sense of belonging.
New Mexico’s colors depend upon our most prized building material—the earth. Outsiders are universally either charmed or appalled by the uniformity of color that our home exteriors present. This response has been going on for hundreds of years, but it hasn’t seemed to influence the fact that New Mexico likes to be an earthbound place, thank you very much. Many communities have codified this preference to ordinance, so important is it to our communal sense of well-being. So, for the most part, our homes are a reflection of the land upon which they sit. Even if few are made of earth—our beloved adobe—and fewer still are plastered with earth pigments, we desire that the exteriors of our homes in New Mexico make solid reference and homage to the past by possessing the appearance of adobe. We are perhaps the only state in the union that makes such a distinctive statement about our identity through our architecture and its color.
While the rest of the world sees us as a uniform brown, we see our home exteriors as a large variety of stucco colors running from buffs to risqué “Scottish Rite Temple Pink,” a Santa Fe landmark that sets the standard for being outside the standard. Ironically, by limiting our exterior color palette to earth tones, New Mexico has created its own long list of adobe-like colors that become subtle expressions of individuality. This variety of hues comes from the fact that earth pigments vary from one location to another, so early New Mexican buildings were a direct reflection of the ground from which they were made, each a little different from its neighbor. While towns or neighborhoods may codify an “adobe-like” appearance, individual preference still reigns. In addition, doors and windows offer an even greater range of choice. Of course white leads the lineup, a reference to its important heritage as among the first colors for the newly milled lumber in the newly minted territory of New Mexico.
Before the opening of the Santa Fe Trail and the coming of the railroad, color in the form of locally occurring pigments and dyes certainly existed, as did the importation of color in the form of special pigments. Like all imported goods, these pigments were rare and certainly costly. Hints of painted walls exist in churches, and traces of pigments appear upon corbels and furniture. Pigments upon statuary and small devotional images, as well as large altar screens, are further testaments to the availability of color for works of art, as well as for decoration. The history and chemistry of what these pigments were and where they came from is sketchy and awaits investigation. What we do know is that once pigments become more widely available through commercial trade, New Mexico became a more colorful place. House paints appear not only on doors and windows but were used to decorate tinwork and furniture and to freshen up religious statuary. It was probably at this point that New Mexico’s favorite color became so popular and prevalent. Our favorite complements the stolid browns and whites, as well as elevates them. I speak, of course, of our heavenly blue.
Again, words fail with blue even though there are an abundance of them, such as azure, cerulean, Prussian, peacock, lapis, indigo, turquoise, and Taos. Each of these words conjures a blue in our mind’s eye, but is the turquoise you see turquoise blue or turquoise green? And Taos blue, is it more indigo or lapis for you? You see the problem, I know, but probably a little differently than I do. Relying upon your local paint store is going to do nothing to clarify; rather you risk being swept into a world of denim, smoky, stormy, marine, sky, baby and robin’s egg blues, to name but a handful.
Blue is a color with a long and powerful history. A royal color, like its pal red, fortunes have risen and fallen upon blue. It conjures every status from the Virgin to the cowboy. Anecdotally, New Mexico sees blue as a protective color used to ward off “whatever” when painted around doors and windows. This is conjectured as possibly a superstitious result of the Franciscan fathers whose garments were dyed with indigo. In any case, New Mexico likes blue—dark and smoky as in Taos, or perky and almost green as in peacock. Royal is nice, and that slightly faded light denim look appeals, as well. Up against a bit of white trim and set off by adobe-colored walls, a blue door has a profound beauty and elegance. Once the door is open to color, it quickly goes inside.
Christine Mather is a museum curator, as well as an author of Santa Fe Style, Santa Fe Houses, Native America, and True West, volumes that explore design and lifestyle.