Colours

The Joy of Poppies - by Matt

Colouring Confusion

Perusing show-houses on a Sunday afternoon I came across an exquisitely restored Orange Grove house in Johannesburg’s North Eastern suburbs: Steel pressed ceilings, Oregon Pine floors and trims pedantically purged of paint and blemishes, with doors varnished to perfection.

As I admiringly examined the paintwork’s faultless lines and perfect finish I couldn’t help imagining what an annoyingly fussy and fastidious person must have been responsible for this. Yet the choice of paint colour suggested otherwise. I was told by the eager estate agent: “he did all the restoration himself you know.” I didn’t.

The children’s room was delightfully colourful. Not in that proverbial chameleon-on-a- Smarty-box way. The light of the room was wonderfully swept up into the four colours that made up the walls and splashed out a joy that kitsch can’t produce. Funny how too much colour or ‘wrong’ colour is like a fine perfume mixed with cigarette smoke.

But this use of colour was captivating. The children’s toys and bedding were convincingly persuasive of the presence of children, all thanks to four completely different coloured walls. I was converted at once and decided that I too would embrace the pedantic little man that perhaps, resided somewhere  deep within me and apply the same vivid and extravagant formula.

I voiced my plan to my ever-tolerant wife about how I was to apply my new conversion to the world of colour to my two daughters rooms. I have seldom seen my wife’s eyebrow raised so close to her hairline. All credit to her forbearance as I was unleashed. Alas, unlike Mister Perfection-Restoration of Orange Grove, I found that painting four walls different colours, plus the ceiling, infuriatingly, maddeningly and unbearably finicky.

Some say it was my actual choice of colours that was causing the nausea, others that it was the peculiar meshing of colours between the walls, but the effect when walking into the room of the four colours was not unlike entering a cabin on board a ship on a rough sea, where the portholes are just hovering above surface level.

Although my girls’ dreams of rainbows, clowns and female members of parliaments’ hats subsided, they never did quite get over their early years subjection to Joseph's Technicolor Dreamcoat on their walls. When we eventually moved home and they reached their teens, I was tentatively offered the task of painting their rooms. This time there was a very firm condition: “Daddy, please, only white, paint only white!”

Whether it’s painting or printing, colour is probably having more of an influence on your life than you think. Whether you call it ambience, atmosphere, mood or vibe you can’t live without colour. But you’d better get the best advice on how to use it. - Written for Consumables Magazine April 2012