earth · raw or burnt, from siena
a colour that has been baked. the wall behind the kitchen stove. the
inside of a clay cup. the place where the candle has scorched the
plaster, season after season.
raw sienna is patient; burnt sienna has lived a small fire. between the
two are most of the warm rooms in sometemple — the long corridor, the back
of library, the floor of ritual where a hundred slow ceremonies have
left the wood a single tone.
sienna is what vermilion becomes in a hundred years.