Home Design - Tips: 01/08/07

Accustomed, as we are today, to having literally hundreds of paint colours available at the touch of the button on an automatic mixing machine, as well as the choice of thousands of textiles, printed and woven in bright design, it is instructive to think of the lengths – the sheer inventiveness and resourcefulness - to which people have gone in order to bring colour into their lives.

All paint colours and dyes as we know them today are, derived from mixing pigment with a binding medium, which allows them to be transferred onto a surface. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, when rapid chemical advance were made and pigments began to produced synthetically, colours were naturally obtained from the minerals and earth, vegetables and plants that were available. Early mediums included egg for the making of tempera, and later oil.
There are about eight earth pigment, including sienna, ochre and umber, and these could be mixed with minerals like iron oxide and copper-based pigments to give a range of colours that suited every need. Roots like indigo were used, too. Rare, precious – and correspondingly expensive – colours ware also made: rich ultramarine blue from crushed, ground lapis lazuli, and the brightest green from malachite treated in the same way. The tones and hues of colours differed, of course, from region to region, which is why we associate today certain colours – particularly those made from earth and clay - with certain areas.

Yarn, too, was rarely left in its natural, undyed state. From flowers and fruits to roots and bark – and even shellfish – dyes were squeezed from the natural world to brings colours to the neutral tones of wool, linen and cotton. In fact, textile rather than flat planes of colours seen on wall, are often the starting point for colours inspirations. Historically, fashion has inspired choices of decorative colours and it still does. To got to a museum of costume or an archive exhibition can be positively regenerating - the colour of embroidered threads on a eighteenth-century brocade waistcoat. The woven design on a nineteenth-century 'kirking' shawl. Modern fashion can be equally thought-provoking – booth street and couture fashion are constantly looking for new ways to use colour, many of which can be translated into decorative terms. This is also true of accessories : many couture houses, for example, once designed silk headscarves (an essential for the elegant woman). Painted design were hand-screened onto silk squares, and the though and subtlety of colour that went into these period pieces are text book examples of the use of colour in our time.

the artists of the impressionist movement used colour to convey the spirit of the immediacy of the natural world. The Landscape in Pierre Auguste Renior`s Chemin montant dans les hautes herbes (c.1876 ) is painted in greens, yellows, blacks and whites – with dashes of red, the complementary colour to green, introduced at strategic points.

Painting are another fertile source of colour inspiration. This applies not only of the colours that artist have used harmoniously, but also in the way in which groups, such as the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionist, used paint in a very precise manner, putting small dashes of colours separately, but next to each other, so that in close-up a dense mosaic of identifiable colour can be seen, whilst at a distance something completely different appears.

Familiarity breeds, if not contempt, then at least laziness. We often accept what we see around us without analyzing why we are pleased by one thing and dismayed by another. All artists – lesser and greater – look, and really try to see what it is they are looking at it again and again, to see not only how the colours work together but also why they work.

In the Renaissance painter, Andrea Mantegna`s (1431-1506) magnificent portrait of Cardinal Carlo de Medici, the eye is drawn to the richness of colour in the robes, emphasized by the thin circle of gold at the neck.

Whether you find your inspiration in a museum or an art gallery, from the pages of a magazine or walking down the street, the interest things is that each and every source, indeed all applied colour, is based on what we see around us in the natural world. When we are inspired by the tones in a painting, we can remember that the artist arrived at that particular effect through his wish to recreate the shades and tones of the world around him. These are the subtitles and nuances that every artist, from the first cave painter onwards, has struggled to interpret and develop. From Piero della Francesca, Fra Angelico and Giotto to Titian, Gainsborough and Reynolds, Renoir and Cezanne to Van Gogh and Matisse – all of them spent their working lives analyzing and refining the best way to use their brush strokes and the colour they had – or could make – to show the tones and colours of nature at their truest.

It would be hard to find a better set of instructors, so we too perhaps should take the colour combinations of nature as our first point of inspirational departure. The most important thing is to look – really look – at the natural colours around us. Everything – a leaf, a flower, a stone – is affected by the colour of the day, the strength of the sunlight at the moment we are looking at it. Light effects everything: the sky itself is a perfect example: look at the sky on a sunlit day to see how many changes in tone there are, from the deepness of bowl over our heads down to the muted tones of the horizon, and the way that a passing cloud will change and intensify those colours.

The Card Player by Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) is a wonderfully rich, dark study, browns, greens, oranges, yellows, and reds all work together with touches of black, white and surprisingly – pink.

As far as colour combinations go, whether subtle or striking, nature, even in miniature, never gets it wrong: recollect the face of a viola with its intense shades of pure purple, mauve, yellow and white; an olive or willow leaf – cool, grey-silver on one side, a harmonizing grey-green on the other; old fashioned pinks with a clear pink petal that contrasts with a dark blood-red centre, framed by a grey-blue leaf; a white hydrangea as it slowly ages into a watered lime green, touched with dashed of mauve-pink and claret. And , on a more awesome scale, the colour of a New England autumn – a travel cliché perhaps, but only because the flamboyantly bright reds, russets, ochres, oranges and toffee browns still make the eye stop with surprise and delight. Or, on quieter level, there is a traditional English rural, wooded landscape, where nothing but green is seen, but with so many subtle variations on a theme that is seems as if an entire paint box has been employed. The variety of colour, of contrast and of tone to be found in nature can never fail to astonish and delight.

In the same way that light changes everything, we see both outside and inside, so lands of light inspire us with the colour that we experience there. In many parts of the world, decorative colour are natural pigments used in their full intensity, rather than the diluted colours so often seen in northern Europe and North America. In India, for example – where the trees, shrubs and flowers are vivid and striking, and the palace of Rajasthan have vibrant interiors with walls studded with bright jewels set against marble – dyes and paints bring colour to everyday surface. These invigorating, exciting pigments have a sharpness and a brightness that more than hold their own under the harsh sunlight, although they might be difficult to live with in more shadowed climes.

In the Caribbean, the fierceness of the light highlight paintwork that was originally painted in cheerful bright pinks, mauves and blues, but which speedily fades to softer shades that harmonize with a natural background of blue water, yellow-green palms and impossibly pale gold sand. Caribbean inspiration could also be found in the show-off sunsets of orange, fire red, shell pink, cream, pale yellow and a touch of old silver, all set against a blackening sea.

The colour of southern France, is the hills of Provence and the Mediterranean, are another colour inspirations. The sun shines brightly here, but the light is diffused and the softer than of the Caribbean. This softness is reflected in the tones of the indigenous trees and plants. There is a subtlety in the colours of the olive trees, the field of lavender and the shutters of faded blue, mauve or green against an ochre or sienna background. These colour translate with comparative ease to more temperate atmospheres.

Lavender fields, in fact, are good examples of the effect natural light has on our surroundings. Compare the lavender fields of Provence and those of England. Both grow the same crop, but the first impressions of the colour of the fields is very different. In the softer, diffused light of England, the lavender looks equally soft, equally diffused; under the clear bright light of southern France, however, the same lavender reaches intensely towards you, emphasizing its brightness and clarity and sheer look value.

Not only do these international example provide inspirations of colour combinations, but they also high – light the need to consider the natural light in a space before selecting colour. All the colours in your scheme will be affected by what one might call external influences; what is outside the window, whether it is the strength of the sunlight, the colour of the sky, the surrounding buildings, or nature, green and in the raw.

very much a colour of the sands and the desert, the warm ochre of this Moroccan mausoleum again seems to exude from the walls, rather than being imposed onto them. The colours of the two different tile design blend and tone with the wall colour in perfect harmony.