I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing.  Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what colour it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.*
Shirley Jackson

those who produced and traded in colours were known as colourmen, and procured rare pigments from across the globe**
Kassia St Clair

On reading Kassia St Clair’s words a year ago
I journaled,
I think I would like to be a colourman
bringing out the colours in people’s lives.
It’s not only writers and painters
who are
“always on,”
Their particular “light” highlighting everything they encounter
in their essential way,
Take a closer look at yourself –
Inside as well as outside^ –
And you will most likely
spot your dominant light.
There I go again,
The colourman,
Wanting to help you notice your
palette.

*Austin Kleon’s blog: Homework every night for the rest of your life;
**Kassia St Clair’s The Secret Lives of Colour;
^The colour of an object is the colour from the light spectrum it will not absorb and so is the colour it is not.