ALL ABOUT COLOR

A meditation on the nature of color and some of its meanings.

“Color doesn’t exist,” Rusch writes. “The sky is not blue. The grass is not green. A violet is not even violet.” The point she’s making is that colors are just reflected light and our brains all perceive hues differently, but she doesn’t get around to explaining that, or any of her equally cryptic ensuing pronouncements about colors, until an afterword in small type that few befuddled young readers will be inclined to tackle. In flat, cut-paper illustrations that resemble screen prints, Goss struggles to provide clarifying examples for terse claims that colors provide signals and warnings, help us to stand out, somehow “make” us see red or feel blue, and can even “color your whole life!” An all-too-close image of a black widow spider’s red marking is the stuff of nightmares, and elsewhere two children who looked angry (depicted in hues of bright red) and then sad (“blue”) on previous spreads unconvincingly “brighten” their day on a page dominated by yellow in which they hug. Depicting a diverse cast of children, the art culminates with several kids gathering to “color” art projects, if not their lives, in a busy studio in which the creators’ likewise confusing All About Nothing (2023) is prominently on display.

Ambitious but underdeveloped and bewildering.