It ain’t easy being green, as the saying goes, and it’s true from both a historic and modern perspective. In the traditional RYB Primary Color model (think the classic color wheel) green rests comfortably and contrastingly between blue and yellow, buffering the cold and warm hues of the color spectrum. Many cultures symbolically associate green with life, health, spring, vitality and nature. However, green also inexorably relates with greed, inexperience and other negative elements of the human condition: and so again we its conflicted nature.
Undoubtedly, humans recognize its significance whether consciously or unconsciously; it is on flags, casino tables, our own American dollar. Furthermore, green is a symbolic hue of growth and rebirth which is most fitting to our painterly application. In our instance, it’s an additive element of the repair process and something we layer on top of itself, building and growing on the bike frame… the final step of our rebirth (well, rebuild) process. As rivers flood their banks to revive dry cracked lands, so too we apply paint over once-cracked carbon surfaces, revitalizing them once more.
Everything we do here at Ruckus is a time-consuming and delicate process, and arguably, the paint process being the apex of this identity. As the final step of repair there’s much to lose if it goes awry.
The repair process is unique to every frame and every damage zone, and although similar frames can have similar damages no two repairs are quite alike. The paint process furthers this truth, as even the exact same frame models can have different shades of the same paint scheme. No two factories apply paint in the same manner, exposure to the sun changes frame hues over time, each layer of paint has different thicknesses…the list goes on. Our process, then, is repeated only on a high topical level(i.e. we re-paint bike frames) and extremely susceptible to variation.
Paint matching, as any painter will tell you, is a specific art in itself. We’ll send it over to our whiz of a painter, Nick, to tell you more: “Bikes with extremely bright or fluorescent paint like the green on these frames are particularly hard to match. The bright colored paints we use at Ruckus are highly transparent, and therefore, whatever base coat I use under the fluorescent color will show through unless a large number of coats are applied. Layering pigments in this manner to achieve a seamlessly-blending desired end result while still matching the original paint is never an easy task, but man is it rewarding!”
For us, it’s way more than just paint. The re-application of the color green represents our continual growth and challenge of the pursuit of perfection through an imperfect medium.
On a greater scale and more hyperbolic sense, painting is more of a human experience. You’ll never reach perfection, and that’s just fine, but one must respect the process of change, the experience of contrast and the rebirth of something great. Don’t let anyone tell you paintin’ is easy…it ain’t.