the color wheel

if you’ve ever looked on a color wheel, and if you look at it hard enough
it will strike you
that the most diverse and abundant colours there are to perceive
are neither the primary colors nor the secondary colors, but the differing tertiary shades
of browns and greys.
and if you were to take a random photograph of the world around you
you will often find
that unless you engineer the scene to bring out the vivid
or fiddle with the hues or turn the saturation up
all you will get are the browns and greys at different intensities
which form the highlights and shadows of reality
which we colour in with our thoughts and imagination
which is why most of the time the photographs we take
are always less beautiful than what we have seen
because our minds can no longer wander
to add vivacity to our scenes;
it is stuck, frozen in the browns and greys of reality.
Most painters never use all the millions of browns and greys which make up our world
for they usually project an idealised beauty onto their work,
consciously or unconsciously…
So is it so unnatural if I should colour in my reality with my imagination
to escape the drab prison of the color wheel
where the inevitable product of adding too many colors together is either white, black or grey?
But my doctors go, “John, there is no such thing as a fourth primary colour. It can’t exist. Have you been taking your risperdal?”
And so my world is brown and grey again. Reality is hard, like concrete.
And the reality is, perception is a prison you can’t escape.