perspectives columnist A Splash of Colour
With our columnist David Paskett, President of the Royal Watercolour Society
T COLOUR CODING
his morning, I awoke to what I thought was the sound of a woodpecker tapping on my window. Having surfaced, I realised it was actually the tapping of a hammer drill on a nearby building site. However, such
smidgens of careless imagining can bring a little colour into the day. Those readers familiar with my monthly columns
may have noticed that they often start with a walk. Today’s amble through London’s winter sales saw me running the gauntlet of shop windows emblazoned with enticing prices that have been ‘knocked down’ or ‘slashed’ – descriptions usually applied to motor accidents or something even more bloody! It wasn’t a pricing massacre that lured me into one particular store but a phalanx of blue-laced, grey boots
that were crying out to be incorporated into a Paskett painting. Inside, an intriguing system of colour-related price coding portrayed on a wall chart helped connect a spectrum of percentage discounts to an accompanying rack of sale items. A few blocks on, in the window of a Saville Row-style
tailors, a mass of red labels sang out from the collars of a wall-to-wall grid of boxed dress shirts. Each had a red spot in the corner and so the artist in me presumed they had all been sold, when closer inspection revealed it was just a logo. This disparity of colour usage set me thinking about
what the public at large reads into colour: their associations, learned or inherited, religious or cultural, and the effects of tradition and taste. Red, for example, has a vast range of confl icting associations: horror and happiness; red-blooded health, illness or even death; good luck and bad. Every day we interpret colour meanings.
Plug wiring is only the start of the rainbow that engineers face on electric circuit boards. Drivers understand the implications of blue signs and green lights. But what colour would you wear at a Chinese funeral or wedding? And if you wave a white cloth, are you surrendering, spreading disease or just Morris dancing? Would everyone still understand why a ship is
fl ying a yellow fl ag and that the man on deck waving red and yellow fl ags isn’t the cabaret act but a signalman? The greys and umbers of wartime Britain
have, in the past, been an integral part of my still life paintings, refl ecting a childhood obsession with militaria. It is no surprise, then, that I was attracted to a shop frontage of stacked, black sewing machinery and into a concrete bunker full of fashionably distressed, mottled thick knit and shabby cotton haute couture. Asymmetric patched shirts with crushed cuffs and loose ends drooping lopsidedly promote a fashionably dishevelled look that would sit charismatically on the young and lithe, while leaving the rest of us in the company of scarecrows. I could translate such ‘chic drab’ as
camoufl age of identity in a time of austerity but prefer to celebrate the delightful subtleties of the colour grey and revel in the patina of age.
The Social
Other news from your local art groups and societies
BATH The Bath Society of Artists’ 107th Annual Exhibition opens on 31 March at Victoria Art Gallery. The hand- in day is 24 March.
EASTBOURNE Towner Gallery hosts the East Sussex Open 2012 from 24 March to 29 April, a selection from over 150 entries.
CARDIFF The South Wales Art Society and Sketching Club was founded in March 1887. Join them for their 125th anniversary show at the new Cardiff Story Museum until 20 April.
HERTFORDSHIRE Applications are being invited for the Herts Open Studios event in September. For more details, visit www.hvaf.
org.uk/open-studios
The RWS Spring Exhibition runs from 23 March to 21 April at Bankside Gallery, London SW1 LEFT David Paskett, Towards Tower Bridge, watercolour on paper
10 Artists & Illustrators FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE ROYAL WATERCOLOUR SOCIETY AT
WWW.ROYALWATERCOLOURSOCIETY.CO.UK
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