I owe pink an apology

The color - not the pop star.

I’d always despised the color pink - thinking it was wimpy and lacking life. Clearly I had been hanging around with all the wrong pinks. It might have been a sad misconception I picked up from my mom. She also hated pink.

Until she got to be about 80. One day she confessed drily, “I like pink. It is because I’m old, I guess. I don’t know. When you get to be an old lady you start liking pink.”

Then we laughed and laughed. But she wasn’t joking - she liked pink.

I started in painting with pink as an act of rebellion - surely REAL artists don’t use pink, do they?

I choose not just “pinky pink’ but what a friend refers to as “PANK” - bright, burn-your-retinas-pink. The pinkest pink of all pinks. Magenta. Fluorescent Pink. Hot Pink. I love them.

Sometimes the pink is a small pop of color and sometimes it animates the body of the work as in the risograph print Cyclone.

Please forgive me pink. I was wrong. You add life and spice to my world.