Green

Emerald Pool 8x8

Along the Channel 8x10

Green is power, nature's fuse, the color of more forces and guises than are countable, a messenger announcing itself, paradoxically, as the hue of both renewal and reproduction or infirmity and illness.  It is at once the preternaturally ambiguous color of life and death, the vernal sign of vitality, and the livid tinge of corruption... 

As the color of Venus and Mercury, devoted lovers, green is peace, vegetation, gladness and rebirth.  It is associated with the number five and is the fairy color, the primal wash, the heraldic tint of envy, of nausea and of hope, of solid gems and eerie mists, of sea cabbage, eelgrass, salt thatch, subaqueous plants, algae, and sea lettuce bearding the rocky shore.  "Green derives from blue and surpasses it," says an old Chinese proverb, referring to the student who, learning from a teacher, grows to surpass him.  Did you know that "greenth" is a legitimate word, although rare, meaning verdure?  To "green" is even a verb, in Scotland, meaning to yearn.  So many hues and shades and tints of green exist in the natural world, so multifarious are its guises, it is impossible ever to fully know them....

From Alexander Theroux in Secondary Colors