| THE EPISTOLARIAN |

A crucial tenet of my art is a term I coined: chromamnesis, color as memory.

Chromamnesis is a phenomenological condition through which color is experienced as memory, rather than a symbolic system to be decoded. A particular blue may recall a wistful afternoon of storm clouds gathering over the beach you swam at as a child, or the softly bright pastel pink of a grandmother’s lipstick.

When choosing ink or wax for a letter, aesthetics speak to far more than how something looks. Appearance is inseparable from feeling. Color communicates in a way that is deeply personal, intuitive, and often ineffable, reaching places language cannot.

Chromamnesis itself is not new, though the word is. The Color Field painters of the 1940s and 1950s were intimately familiar with color’s power. They allowed vast expanses of pigment to speak for themselves, unmoored from representation, narrative, or overt symbolism.

Take, for example, this work by Helen Frankenthaler.

Frankenthaler titled this painting The Bay, yet it is not truly about bays. The title offers a point of entry, not an explanation. The painting asks us to feel first, to let color act directly on perception and emotion. The experience precedes interpretation.

Chromamnesis allows color to be both experience and symbol. A blue may evoke water, or wisdom, or grief, or nothing at all. It may also carry a memory that belongs entirely to the viewer, untethered from shared meaning. In chromamnesis, color does not have to resolve into interpretation. It is permitted to remember.

I have been particularly drawn to the feeling of Yves wax, in part because it closely matches the lapis lazuli stone I have been using to press seals.

Yves Klein treated color not as atmosphere or field, but as an absolute presence. Where Color Field painting invites immersion, Klein demands confrontation. His blues do not drift. They declare.

We cannot know what Klein would have thought of chromamnesis. His work sought to dissolve meaning rather than accumulate it. Chromamnesis, by contrast, allows color to simply be, while also permitting it to evoke thought, feeling, and memory. In my work, color is not forced into interpretation, but it is not emptied of memory either.

For me, Yves blue also evokes a much larger history of color, ultramarine, both synthetic and natural, derived from lapis lazuli, a stone long associated with truth, wisdom, sovereignty, and the divine. Ground into ultramarine, lapis was once more valuable than gold, reserved for the robes of the Virgin and the most sacred passages of illuminated manuscripts. It is a stone bound to reverence, clarity, and inner vision.

In Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, the blue of the girl’s headpiece includes natural ultramarine pigment derived from lapis lazuli.

This is where chromamnesis moves from modern painting into lived ritual.

Taking the color Yves, it evokes the presence of my grandmother, Gamma, whose 109th birthday is today. She had the most comforting, nonjudgmental way of being. Her hands were worn from years of doctoring and knitting, and she often wore a large lapis lazuli necklace.

When I think about the symbolism of this color and its association with wisdom, that meaning becomes inseparable from her. For me, wisdom is not abstract. It lives in hands that have tended bodies, mended garments, and held others without judgment.

Through chromamnesis, color is freed from explanation and made available for personal meaning and ritual.

Kathryn’s Chromamnetic Dictionary

Chromamnesis is a way of understanding how color carries memory, emotion, and meaning before language intervenes. Colors register in the body and nervous system first, then in thought. They arrive already charged.

Across time and culture, certain associations recur because color works at the level of perception rather than instruction. These meanings are neither fixed nor arbitrary. They are tendencies. Chromamnesis pays attention to these tendencies and to how they surface in lived experience.

What follows is a reference, not an etiquette guide, but a vocabulary to notice. Most importantly, see how these land in your body. Do they feel accurate to you? Where do they feel different than described?

WHITE
Clarity, truth, openness, blessing
Often felt as a clearing or a beginning. White holds intention without insisting on outcome.

BLACK
 Containment, protection, boundaries, endings
Often felt as depth or shelter. Black absorbs and holds, creating space rather than absence.

RED
Vitality, passion, courage, desire, will
Immediate and activating. Red carries momentum and physical presence.

PINK
Tenderness, affection, emotional repair
A softened red. Less urgency, more care.

ORANGE
Creativity, attraction, confidence
Warm and expansive. Often associated with movement and expression.

YELLOW
Intellect, communication, memory, joy
Bright and alert. Closely tied to language and exchange.

GREEN
Growth, stability, healing, abundance
Steady and cumulative. Green supports what unfolds over time.

BLUE
Truth, calm, wisdom, order
Spacious and stabilizing. Historically linked to protection and moral clarity.

LIGHT BLUE
Healing, reconciliation, gentle truth
Cooling and easing. Useful when emotional repair is needed.

PURPLE
Authority, intuition, spiritual depth
Dense and inward-facing. Carries a long association with sovereignty.

GOLD
Illumination, mastery, visibility
Expansive and affirming. Often connected to legacy and recognition.

SILVER
Reflection, memory, intuition
Quiet and receptive. Resonant with cycles and inward attention.

BROWN
Grounding, home, care
Reliable and sustaining. Supports the everyday structures of life.

GRAY
Ambiguity, pause, concealment
Suspensive rather than indecisive. Allows things to remain peacefully unresolved.

LAVENDER
Devotion, tranquility, contemplative presence
A gentler register of purple. Calming rather than commanding.

TURQUOISE
Emotional truth, creativity, healing speech
Encourages emotional honesty and ease in communication.

Join Me Next Weekend

I hope you will join me next weekend for a live Zoom gathering where we will write ourselves into being for the year ahead. This is one of the most sacred letter-writing practices I know, and one of the ways I have shaped my life into what it is today.

If you feel ready to step more fully into the life you are imagining, I invite you to join me for the Letter of Becoming workshop on January 11 at 11:11 a.m. Pacific.

To a colorful week ahead, and ideally the colors that feel just right,