#2: "The Brilliance of Flaming June"

 

    On a cloudy Thursday afternoon, I saw a glimpse of June. Despite the heat all week, the rain left nothing but a light stain on the concrete. I attended my final class of the day— Writing Magazine Non-Fiction with Professor Laura Castañeda. As she spoke, I saw bright flashes and quickly realized she had just gotten a manicure with a fresh tangerine polish. Frankly, I have never seen anyone wear orange nail polish. When I asked her why she chose this colour amid winter, she said, “I just felt like it.”

Orange is the color we ridicule the most. I’m guilty of it. People amusingly gawk when they see it; it’s almost clownish (and the color of the world’s favorite clownfish). But when you wear it, it absorbs all mundanity, projecting a warmth that often feels familiar. I previously said that red is bold, but wait until you wear orange. One imagines its sharp citrus juice melting on their tongue. Orange is the national colour of the Netherlands. I named my cat Saffron because of her calico coat. It is the colour of summer, fusing all shades of fire, bronze and cinnabar at sunset. It is a secondary color— a concoction of red and yellow. Orange signifies transition.

When Frederic Leighton exhibited “Flaming June” in 1895 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, critics praised it as his best work. The painting, now returned to the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, previously on loan from the Met, is an ode to the New Aesthetic Movement. Today, we understand it as a renegotiation of the relationship between artist and society, shaping fine art into an inherently beautiful practice blended with different eclectic art periods. The beauty in “Flaming June” is not the subject itself, but how Leighton emotes through orange: sensuality, vulnerability, solitude, and the sweet sticky heat of sizzling June.

According to art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon, Leighton loosely rendered the subject from Michelangelo’s Night, which Leighton regarded as one of the supreme achievements of Western Art. Italian artist Giorgio Vasari published Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects in 1550, which includes a quatrain about Night by Giovan Battista di Lorenzo Strozzi called il Vecchio:

“The sweetly sleeping Night on which you look
Has all the life an angel’s hand could give to stone;
And thus, because she sleeps, she lives:
Wake her, if you still doubt it; she will speak”

The Victorian painter reimagines Michelangelo’s monumental nude in abstraction, warming its original funereal solemnity. Excluding the title, we can already guess it’s summer. The sleeping woman, slumped in a marble seat, is wrapped in detailed apricot drapery—her cheeks reddened by the heat, reflected by the molten gold sunset in the background. An oleander blooms over the wall, a poisonous presence creeping near the sleeping beauty. The subject holds our attention, and the viewer becomes the voyeur—it’s an opportunity to contemplate how the woman’s orange draperies reiterate the curvature of her arrested body.

Leighton specialised in depictions of women in allegorical or mythological guises, like Pomona (1653-1733); their erotic appeal disciplined by elegant grandeur. The use of orange is a symbolism of the in-between: reality and idealism, the enfleshed human soul in conversation with nature, and tranquillity, contrasting with the embossing colour itself.

Coming back to campus, fall remains. Temperatures are dropping next week. Orange produces an aroma, a distinct scent we’ve known since childhood— but this time, it’s all about blossoming. Without the discovery of the fruit, there would be no orange. The word orange itself comes from the ancient Sanskrit term “naranga,” which meant “fragrance.” Its scent, energy and quaintness alone encouraged a discovery— a surprise, even.

I say this after my recent nail appointment, with a fresh set of orange almond nails– “Autumn Blaze,” to be specific. I’m not exactly sure what drove me to this colour, apart from the coincidence of my upcoming blog post and my professor’s nail polish. It's new, even for me. After thinking it’s a colour one "ridicules," it's awfully fitting. I guess I just felt like it.