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Collage workshop: Aida Gonzalez Fry’s work in progress.
There is not a soul on earth who does not have a creative streak running through them and a child-like joy that gets released when allowed to mess with paint and paper, exploring the world of colour and shape...or so I thought. That is why my friend Lorraine and I decided to bring New York artist David Hornung to Toronto for a colour and collage workshop. And this wasn’t the first time. David is a professor of colour courses whose book, Colour: A Workshop for Artists and Designers, was so inspirational that last year Lorraine and I got him to come here and teach us colour mixing.
David Hornung showing us colour mixing.
Like the time before, we rounded up nine others who were willing to book off an entire week and we settled in to Lorraine’s wonderful studio.
Lorraine’s normally tidy studio by day two. Just being there makes you feel like an artist.
And then it happened. I realized I was dreadful at collage! It was not just that I was positioned at a table between two brilliant collage artists – my friend Aida Gonzalez Fry, a painter and colour designer from Florida and my daughter Caroline – always an inspiration.
Me with my daughter, Caroline Macfarlane of The Good Bike fame.
As Aida and Caroline magically produced one wonderful piece after another, as if born collaging, I struggled and pushed and forced paper and paint into submission in the most unsatisfying way. And so it continued: day one…day two… I was resigning myself to the knowledge that we can’t all be good at everything. I might think I am brilliant at selecting the best colours for a client’s home but that doesn’t mean I don’t “suck” at collage.
The work starting to come together. The two top works are by Sharyn Adler Gitalis, a friend, colour and lighting designer, and artist in her own right.
Day three something started to click for me. I started getting into a groove. Things seemed to come together almost by themselves. It was great! Almost effortless and so satisfying. Suddenly I was making pieces that even looked wall-worthy. Collage was amazing!!! I had begun.
Sharyn, Helene Vinet, old friend and artist Barbara Todd at her computer, and quilt artist Joyce Seagram.
So this is what I learned: To accomplish something new, or something that does not come easily, we have to allow ourselves time. If you are successful from the get-go, challenge yourself to go to the next level, the place where you are tempted to give up and to say you can’t do it. We may not have the mythic 10,000 hours to truly become accomplished, but I am convinced that if we can be in a place without the phone beeping, the internet tempting, and life interrupting, we can all accomplish great things.
The group critique. Barbara, Marilyn, Patsy, Joyce (seated), Roz Kavander and Lorraine. Most sporting the aprons cut from a roll of plastic sheeting.
It is harder to do it alone. David Hornung was a fabulous guide and guru. But he wasn’t joking when he said we should all come back together for another week without him. There was such a power to the collective energy in the space. It is a total pleasure to be single-mindedly focused in a room full of people with a similar intent. I speculate it would be like running a marathon or just getting through an exercise class, we do better in a group. We don’t give up. We go just a little further, try just a little harder…and we have more fun.
Roz Kavander, my friend and my travel buddy when I go to CMG colour conferences.
And, in case I ever doubted it, I am convinced we are all creative. We just need to make the time and find the place where we can let it come out. If we can’t find that, then we have to invent it for ourselves.
Caroline’s works in progress.
The best things happen when, one way or another, you just do it!
If you are an artist, designer or latent creative type and want to be contacted in the spring of 2013 about the next workshop then let me know. Hornung’s book will be re-released this fall and is a must have for anyone who is serious about colour.
Janice Lindsay, CMG, colour and design consultant who is committed helping others make their place suit their personality. Her projects have been as big as a concert hall and as small as a child’s playhouse. She speaks about colour and design, has written the book All About Colour, and is a casaGURU GURU.
Brooklyn Bridge
Last week I had the “hardship” of helping a client with her Brooklyn Heights apartment. What an amazing neighbourhood! Let me share with you some of the colour spotted on a prematurely spring-like weekend.
Roses
I hate the term “pops of colour” but there certainly were lots of them! Bold colours do look great against dark backgrounds.
Blossoms
Blossoms were out everywhere.
Flower Store
Flower store on Atlantic Avenue.
Mini Garden
Everyone seemed eager to get colour into their mini-gardens.
Wearing Colour
People were transitioning their wardrobes from winter darks to spring bolds.
Street
How can you not be in love with entire neighbourhoods with a total absence of white – facades, clothes, cars...?
Brownstone
Black or dark brown is the perfect trim colour for Brownstones because the facades are balanced - well proportioned and adequately detailed. They don’t need distracting contrast colouring.
Street with Colour
Where the brick row houses were painted, toned whites were just a small part of a mixed palette.
Green House
Whoever chose the colours for this green house did a wonderful job. The rather frisky green is toned done by the brownstone-coloured trim. The coral coloured door is an off-centre red, a tertiary, that is the perfect coordinate to the off-center or tertiary green. The brown is carried across to the blue house and ties the two together.
Back to Basics, Back to Brown
Old-fashioned brown trim blends this home into the backyard in a way that is soft, simple and understated. It can be hard to pick unattractive colours which just settle in and do the job without any look-at-me pretention but they let the eye enjoy other things – like the play of light across the textures of the brick and the setting.
Façade: Darr on Atlantic
Brown is the colour of old oxfords, your granny’s crocodile handbag and the hue of humble materials - wood and mud. Brown is so out of fashion it is totally cool. Brown is the key colour for the upcycled grunge aesthetic that embraces old objects and worn and aged materials and continues as the hottest look for shops and bars in Brooklyn.
Darr Façade
Darr: one of my favourite stores to visit.
Decrepit Looking Bar on Atlantic
New bars are styled to play up old charm. No white, lots of texture and patina.
Bar with Red Wall
Homey comfort is enhanced by the faded red wall, the gold ceiling, the random worn furnishings – not to mention the boulle court at the back of the long room.
Old Red Green Combo
Time and weather have attractively oxidized this red-green combo.
Williamsburg Nightclub
Uptown in Williamsburg, fun colours turns ugly into art. For those of us who love colours but can’t decide which one, this would be great at the back of a house or in a front hall if you dared.
Building on Bond at the Corner of Bond and Pacific
On Sunday I went for lunch at Building on Bond because I love the relaxed vibe of all the wood browns, the upcycled bric-a-brac turned into funky decor. The undesigned design aesthetic.
Brunch at Building on Bond
…and the food matches the décor in that is is all about back to basics comfort. (Don’t even think of try paying for it with something as slick as plastic.)
Aussie Restaurant
The first time I ever got to choose the colour for a room I chose black. I was seventeen. It was a large room in our basement and I painted the fake wood paneled walls black, high gloss black. That was when my love affair with black began.
Poodle Head. Designer, Abigail Ahern
Black’s beauty comes as a surprise to most people. When I suggest it to clients they think it will be depressing, that it will suck the life-blood right out of them, or that it is only suitable for their rebellious teenage kids. But those who take the plunge are invariably shocked to find out how fabulous it is and wonder why on earth they waited so long. Here are six reasons why black is a fantastic wall colour:
Abigail Ahern
Black is relaxing. We live in a world of visual over-drive – over 80% of information is received visually. We need black, the colour of quiet, to chill out. Darkness reduces visual input while enhancing our other senses; this why we close our eyes when we kiss and dim the lights at concerts. In a black room you can hear yourself think. In a busy, urban, largely white world, we need black for psychological balance.
Bedroom image from Sheri Martin Interiors
Black is neutral. If your chromatic comfort zone is neutrals, black adds drama, interest and rhythm into the palette while avoiding “colour”. It is important to use value – light to dark – effectively if you are working with a neutral palette, otherwise it will be flat. Extend beyond pale and midtone values into black or charcoal for depth and variety.
Living room image from Sheri Martin Interiors
Stairway. Abigail Ahern
Black makes small spaces bigger. Our eyes do not focus on black surfaces. They seem to look through them into a deep void. Add gloss to take it further and exaggerate the effect. Use black to double the width of a narrow powder room, the breadth of a small vestibule or the height of low basement ceilings.
Fireplace. Abigail Ahern
Black is slimming. The little-black-dress principle works for everything from furniture to cabinets. Black reduces bulk so use it for sofa upholstery and paint it on bookcases, fireplaces and cabinetry or any protuberance that seems too big for the room. Outside use black on large sheds or garages to reduce their size.
Black hides flaws and emphasizes features. Our eye is drawn to light things and floats over dark. At night we look at stars, not sky. So paint anything that is ugly, flawed or boring black to make it go away. Then notice how black walls, like the frame around a painting, are the background against which everything looks great! Black makes it easy to create focal points. Decorating a black room requires few but better pieces making you the curator of what it is you want to feature and enjoy.
Abigail Ahern and her London home.
Replace white with black for a beautiful exterior. Black, off-black, charcoal or dark brown trim and details can give even rather ordinary brick or stone homes a sophistication that white does not. Homes become more Japanese in style or contemporary. Garage doors are less in-your-face. But the real magic is the garden. Any fences or structures that are painted with dark colours take on a gentler presence and let the colours of nature be the star of the show. Against black all colour glows.
Shiny black. Abigail Ahern
Nineteenth century British artist J. M. W. Turner said you cannot paint light without dark colours. I think we need dark walls to really see and appreciate the light spaces; they seem so much brighter by comparison.
Light. Abigail Ahern
Room in the Hotel Chelsea
Fave blacks from my Coming Home Colour Collection for PPG Pittsburgh Paints:
As one of my black-loving clients once said to me: Black is the colour of confidence. You just have to have the confidence to use it.
Please send me your dark stories!
BY_Lissoni lounge designed by Piero Lissoni, IDS 2012's International Guest of Honour
I loved this year’s exciting Interior Design Show. It had a good buzz, lots of variety and good colour sightings.
For subtle colour, great texture and the sophisticated comfort of my fave “style” - Warm Modern - the award goes to the BY_Lissoni, a lounge by Italian designer-architect Piero Lissoni. At first glance the 1200 square foot space, with furnishings by his brand partners - Living Divani, Lema, Porro & Flos - looked all white: walls, shelves, gauze ceiling, even white-washed floors by Moncer, but it becomes clear Lissoni knows the key to working with white: good light and lots of texture.
The shelves were filled with tightly packed paper-backs, their white washed spines and aged ecru pages created a soft graphic pattern that added with warmth and texture (the comfort of books abstracted). Other shelves held African artifacts adding to the beauty and soul of hand-made one-of-a-kind objects. No “decorative” colour interrupted the strict palette of whites and naturals. Furniture juxtaposed cool white – the marble coffee table – with the toasty hues and varied textures of the burlap-like sofa fabric and objects in leather and wood. I badly wanted to take the booth, lock stock and barrel, and install in my living room.
"How Do I Look?", painted cherry wood art by Rob Day
From the all-Canadian True North part of the show, my object of desire was the tree-part turned sculpture by Rob Day. He painted nature’s cast-off in horizontal stripes (which always look happy to me) and poised it cheekily on an old banister knob. If it were not $6000 I would love to commission hundreds of them to lean in dull, grey, straight-edged work-places or anonymous hallways all over town. Psychologically, we always get a sense of home and belonging from bits of nature in our unnatural environments. Plants, flowers, a view of trees, even a landscape painting or floral carpet can help. This piece gives homey a new spin.
There were sightings of shiny clean light blue in surprising places - a glazed fireplace surround and the floor of this booth. The combination of light blue and shine can be discombobulating on a floor– as if you are walking on water or about to fall through ice – but that is why it was novel and fun to experience.
Relative Space featured FreeSCALE a collection of eco-friendly carpet tiles by Vorwerk. Goodbye 9 x 12 or 6 x 8. With these tiles your carpet does not have to be square. Now your carpet can be any size, shape or colour combination. Flip the shape around to create curves or bends, add or subtract to suit your space. Pull one or two out for glimpses of your floor. And if you change your wall colour why not change out a few tiles to match? Or, change the palette seasonally? The mind boggles at the possibilities.
What about making the carpet the art in a room? The Tokyo carpet from W Studio has a painterly colour combination and graffiti-like patterning.
Lighting fixtures ranged from simple to sassy; from the clean lines of fixtures made of wood veneer by Woodlight to L’Atelier Non-Useless’s UP lamp.
The PVC pole comes with stretchy fabric sleeves that can be moved up or down or scrunched to adjust the level and position of light. This prototype will be produced for a cost of about $70 a foot and sized to fit your room height if enough people want one. I signed up for two.
And just when I thought I had seen it all and was on my way to the escalators, I saw Bocci’s latest lights called 28. The hand blown glass balls come in any colour (or clear) and can be suspend to any length individually or in clusters ($750 each from Kiosk). Half a dozen of mixed colours would look pretty cool over my dining table.
So I would say that this year’s show was the best in years. It did what you want and fear a design show will do: send you home with fresh ideas, a lot of décor zeal, and a strong desire to make some big changes! Hmmmm…
Martin Cederblad's picture of blue room designed by Swedish stylist and designer, Sara Sjögren.
What is the most commonly stated “favourite colour”? Blue! Not aqua or baby blue but royal blue, indigo, or its more vivid family member that is the colour originally made from Lapis Lazuli. This last colour was, for centuries, the most prized, rare and expensive of hues, literally worth its weight in gold. Only the wealthy could afford this blue, and they used to make artists and artisans sign a contract for how much good blue they would get and where it would be used. Inspectors would make surprise visits to ensure no less expensive blues were being substituted. In my work as a colour designer, what is the colour my clients most rarely use? Yup, royal blue. The exception is accent walls in a sporty child’s bedroom.
The demise of blue began when blue no longer had to be shipped from exotic and hard to reach places in Afghanistan and laboured over for months to turn into usable pigment. In the mid nineteenth century the chemical industry was producing all sorts of bold new artificial colours. (This made Impressionism possible.) Blue became just one of the many. Van Gogh still thought blue was the divine colour. For Picasso, poor and lonely in turn-of-the-century Paris, it was the colour of sadness and longing – his blue period.
A Yves Klein painting done in his signature colour, IKB, found on postandgrant.co.
French artist Yves Klein invented a recipe for an artificial blue that he thought rivaled the beauty of the natural pigment. So thrilled with the colour he called IKB (International Klein Blue) was he that he took out a patent on it and painted a series of all blue canvases.
Today stores selling china, jewelry and glassware use blue for the displays because blue is the colour of things we cannot touch or hold – water, air, and space – so, psychologically, it says Do Not Touch. In advertising it is the colour most often used by banks because it conveys honesty and trustworthiness. In clothing blue has always been the conservative colour of uniforms, blazers and the easy going denim. It is a way to wear colour without appearing colourful.
So why not on walls?
Naho Kubota's photograph of Jeffrey Inaba’s pop-up café, located in the halls of the Whitney Museum of American Art for the 2010 Biennial, which uses blue light to create a surreal ambiance.
Perhaps it is time to disassociate the colour with sports and see it as van Gogh did – the divine colour - and tap into its unearthly beauty.
In this powder room I used blue wallpaper, blue gloss on the ceiling and the client added a black mirror to complete the surroundings.
Use blue as an alternative to red in a dining room and as a way to expand the dimensions and drama of a powder room. Deep royal blue alters space, blurs the shape and size, and transforms a room into a mysteriously magical world with surrealistic splendor. It can be had without the requiring a king’s ransom!
In this room I used shine on the walls and gold on the ceiling for warmth and drama. I cannot imagine how unpleasant white would be here!
Tips on using indigo: Go all the way. The key is to be submerged in this colour. You are creating a three-dimensional atmosphere – space - not defining an area. No white ceiling and trim!! They interrupt the ambiance.
Blue trim! Painting trim the same colour as the walls or ceiling prevents colour interruption.
Paint the trim the same blue as the walls or a deep colour. Ditto the ceiling. though gold, metallic or mirror finishes are also good because they bounce light and add shimmer. Alternatively, use a second and slightly lighter blue, for example, with a dark blue like PPG Pittsburgh Paints 349-7 Dragonfly on the walls, use PPG 348-5 Shrinking Violet on the ceiling.
Blue Graffiti: This mural in San Francisco has an interesting blue based palette that avoids complementary colours that kill blue’s mood.
Sheen will increase depth and space. Feel free to use satin finish on all surfaces: walls, trim, ceiling. The floor or carpeting can be lighter or brighter, a contrast, a relief.
Pop-up café designed by the Rockwell Group, NYC
Furnish the space with things that are white or bright, have crystal or sparkling surfaces. Metals are good. Expand the palette into magenta and berry colours. Blue is the deep background against which these things play.
Note: Blue is not always cold. It gets warmer as it gets darker. Blues can be warm if you choose one that leans away from the turquoise and green side of the colour wheel and goes toward purple and red where it picks up warm undertones. Try PPG Pittsburgh Paints 347-6 Blue Odyssey, PPG 348-7 Brilliant Blue, or PPG 445-7 Royal Hyacinth from my Coming Home Colour Collection. (Ask for a big chip or a brochure.)
Janice Lindsay is one of Canada's leading colour designers, with a wealth of experience in residential, commercial and institutional projects. She is a colour consultant, travels the continent speaking about colour and design, and is also a casaGURU GURU.
This week seemed especially full of colour treats.
Treat #1: Pantone announced the Colour of the Year for 2012 and it is a favourite of mine! Tangerine Tango, Pantone #17-1463 (or variations like PPG Bay Coral 127-6 and PPG Cinnamon Stone 129-7). Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute said, "Reminiscent of the radiant shadings of a sunset, Tangerine Tango marries the vivaciousness and adrenaline rush of red with the friendliness and warmth of yellow, to form a high-visibility, magnetic hue that emanates heat and energy,” How perfect!
Room designed by Susan Diana Harris Interior Design, image from sfgate.houzz.com
Chairs designed by Herman Miller
Wishbone chair, designed by Hans J. Wegner, manufactured by Carl Hansen & Son
Deborah Lippmann's 'Super Model' nail polish
Treat #2: My daughter took me to Red at Canadian Stage, a play set in the late 1950s in the studio of New York abstract expressionist painter, Mark Rothko. It portrays him as he works on what was the largest ever modern art commission - $35,000 for a mural series for the Four Seasons Restaurant in the then new Seagram Building on Park Avenue. Rothko actually did thirty red paintings but not one ever hung in the restaurant. Rothko found the place too vulgar for such serious works. He gave back his advance and sent nine of dark red canvases to the Tate in London, England. They arrived the day he committed suicide in New York. By then in his paintings he was mostly using black. You may enjoy this video I found which takes you to the Tate for a recent show that reunited the thirty red pieces.
One from Rothko's Seagram commissioned series.
Treat #3: Cindy Bisaillon’s The Power of Colour series aired on CBC’s Ideas. I had the thrill of being part of it and in the company of some of my favorite colour authors:
In the second episode I especially like Riley’s description of van Gogh’s yellow house in Arles and the effect of its colour.
Treat #4: My hot-off-the-press copy of Eve Ashcraft’s The Right Color arrived. I confess I am a little envious of this New York colour designer who got to work with Martha Stewart on her first colour collection, the Araucuna Collection, based on the colour of Stewart’s hens’ eggs. Stewart might be challenging to work for, but she is a colour genius. Years ago, one of her colour team told me about going out to her farm and having to colour match things like the fur on the back of her dogs’ ears and the tarnish on her pewter collection. But most challenging of all was when she waltzed into the studio, threw her pearls down on the worktable and said, “Look at all the colours in these. They are beautiful and I want them all!” Yeah, Martha!
Eve has just done what I would kill to do: her own collection of 28 colour essentials (made by Fine Paints of Europe, the Farrow & Ball of U.S. paint companies). The collection includes two reds:
Ashcraft’s book, which showcases the collection, does seem a bit like an ad and her colour guidance seems to state the obvious (maybe that is because we colour designers think alike - it was as if she were inside my head). But she did make me think about using colour on stair risers more bravely. White gets too scuffed and shows the dirt. I often tone it down or do two alternating tone-on-tone colours. But she used dark blue in an orange hall of a Georgian home. It did not look at all garish. It fit right in. Thank you Eve, for one more way to ditch some white and unify colour.
It was a great week!
Not every guy is bad at colour. That is why I thought it was worth driving eight hours last summer to MASS MoCA in Massachusetts to spend time soaking in the effect of the late American artist Sol LeWitt’s colourful walls.
Sol LeWitt installation at MASS MoCA
And there are delightful guys who really get into and enjoy colour regardless of their skill level with it.
I spotted these colour enthusiasts in Toronto, Pittsburgh and Australia
But usually guys don’t pay colour much attention. Maybe we should cut them some slack, after all about eight percent of men are colour blind, and thanks to having two X chromosomes - two chances to get the colour gene right (smile) - women rarely are. In our evolutionary past, was colour a big part of a guy’s job? They evolved as hunters who needed skills in speed, way finding, hitting a target - jock-type skill sets but colour discrimination – ahhhh not so much. (Raw meat is red, if it is not your nose will tell you.) So I believe that is why today they tend to be more preoccupied with and good at sports than colour palettes. We gals, the gatherers, have eons more experience with colour – a few million years worth - and that is why client husbands can make me mad when I try to do my job.
It happened again the other day. I met a client who was ready for change and ready to embrace colour in her taupe living room. I then had the pure delight of pulling together fabrics and a paint palette based on her decision to go with fuchsia.
Pink shop display in London, England.
We chose PPG Pittsburgh Paints Fuchsia Flock 237-7 for the walls and grey mauve Ancestral 537-4 for the ceiling and cornice. Her room was dark, the art was huge, and the furniture old fashioned but good. Using a rich but cheeky colour on the walls and in the fabrics would refresh and balance the elements. She and her daughter were very excited. Then her husband came home.
Now if he had been a guy like the amazing Ozwald Boateng, the British designer with Savile Row training, who has been known to design purple suits with magenta shirts and orange ties, he might have loved it.
Ozwald Boateng, photo from topnews.in
But sadly, her husband looked at all the fabrics and paint chips and announced that he did not like “pink”. Well, girls, if your husband is going to make the decisions, then he needs to be part of the process. There is never only one right way to design a room. Even when choosing a wall colour there are four key factors to be considered:
This is what makes my job so wonderfully interesting. I am not the dictator but the translator. I assess the first three aspects and, with direction from my clients, translate their desires and personalities into the colour selection. And we do it together.
I would never impose a colour - especially one as edgy as fuchsia! It comes out of a discussion. She wanted the room to be warm, friendly, and a place where they and their friends would want to hang out. Where as in her bedroom and ensuite, she wants it to feel like a hotel room in Paris so we will be using lots of whites.
For round two on the living room I will suggest to them a very different strategy. The art can be the colour. The walls can be charcoal – perhaps PPG 530-6 Gibraltar Grey – with white trim, neutral upholstery, light polished linens to modernize the antiques, and the carpet, “Jazz” by Roy Banse from Weavers Art? We can have fun in a less colourful way.
Jazz by Roy Banse, Weavers Art
But then the problem will be the dogs. They won’t like this scenario. Not because all dogs are colour-blind, but because they would have to stay off the couch. Hmmm. Who is the boss, really???
I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where red, not green, was nature’s neutral!? They say there are no colour mistakes in Nature and look how shockingly bold reds can be!
autumn leaves against a purple wall outside my house
Inside, it is a truism that all good rooms have a little red. But if you love red as much as I do, a little just isn’t enough. I like the sound of American writer and wit Dorothy Parker’s living room in her Bucks County, Pennsylvania, farmhouse. In the 1930’s it was painted nine shades of red.
(phantom) L'Opéra Restaurant, in the Palais Garnier, Paris by French architect Odile Decq image © designboom
My kitchen has six reds (one on each of the five upper cabinets and one on the ceiling) and it opens onto a dining room with two more shades.
my red kitchen cabinets
Red is warm and welcoming, an attention grabbing extravert. We are biologically wired to pay attention to red (which is why if you want a product to sell, put red on it). In our evolutionary past red was the colour of things we needed to notice - food, weather changes, and sunset and sunrise - the light that bracketed the day.
sunset over Lake Temagami
Red didn’t give answers but alerted us to questions. Was a red sky a sailor’s delight or a shepherd’s warning? Was the red of blood a sign of life or of death? Red is still associated with love and its opposite, hate. It is the colour of power and courage. People move more quickly in red rooms because red excites and activates us. That is why it is a great choice for the below furniture showroom in Soho, New York.
B&B Italia showroom
Red is an advancing colour. Yes, red will make a room smaller but that can be half of its appeal. Red increases our pulse rate and our brainwaves and stimulates our metabolisms, so, unless you are on a diet, it is an excellent dining room colour.
dining room designed by me
I love mixing reds with reds and then softening them by eliminating any sharp whites that bring out the strength of a colour. But, if bold, full-on red is what you want, then check out the below image of the Parisian L'Opéra Restaurant. It is a great example of red punched up with white.
image © designboom
The beautiful, almost visceral, undulating curves of red are offset by the pale and colourless surrounding. The result is a place that probably looks its best when no one is there. Red makes things special and, at the end of the day, maybe we all deserve at least a little of the red carpet treatment in our lives.
hall in Hotel Havana, San Antonio
Note: If you missed I Send You This Cadmium Red at the Berkley Theatre in Toronto, don’t miss Canadian Stage’s production of Red, John Logan’s Tony Award-winning play about a tumultuous moment in the career of Abstract Expressionist painter and colour genius, Mark Rothko (running November 19 to December 17).
I was in San Antonio at the annual Color Marketing Group Conference with about two hundred other colour professionals from around the world (though mostly Americans), meeting to find out what’s going on in the world of colour and design.
CMG's gala dinner at Aldaco's Restaurant in Sunset Railway Station, built 1919.
I also recently gave the PPG Colour and Trends for 2012-2013 talk at IIDEX. So I’ve been giving trends a great deal of thought. In the next weeks I will take you through each colour family individually to describe what’s going on. But today I take you behind the scenes at CMG to explain the colour trend process, and then I’ll share the big drivers behind colour and design for 2012 and 2013.
At CMG, members fit into two main categories:
Me with fellow CMGers; designer and blogger Maria Killam (www.colourmehappyblog.blogspot.com) and colour consultant Denise Turner (www.colorturners.com)
We’re then put into groups of 10 from mixed industries. Each person brings up to 12 key colours; these are not what we like and want to use, but what we notice our clients or our industries are wanting; not what is doing well, but what is a bit different from last year and why.
A year or two ago the big story was grey, grey, grey – six ways to Sunday. Why? Because we were getting tired of green as the literal and ubiquitous colour of things environmental so grey – unbleached, earthy, and softer than white – came in to give relief. It is also always a big colour for harsh economic times.
In steering, Pittsburgh designer Lynn Smith adds her group's colours to the finalist board.
After individual presentations of what colours and why, we put all those colours up on a board. We then debate and whittle them down to which will be the 12 we take to the next level: steering. At steering every group’s “facilitator” takes their results and goes through round two of negotiations. The ultimate 12 survivors of that round become the official CMG palette for that category.
Every group builds a colour and design board.
All the boards in a colourful row.
Facilitators and group captains capture the 12 key colours for 2012-2013. (That's me in the striped skirt.)
And now for the driving forces behind what we want in colour and design…
We live in chaotic times where nothing is safe or certain. The economy, the environment, and social structures are unstable and under stress. We have lost faith in systems created by others we thought wiser than ourselves. Look at what happens? Informed and empowered by technology and social media, we become more opinionated, self-reliant and independent. We flex our muscle and are no longer complacent or apathetic. We realize the power of one.
The rise of individualism and self-reliance.
We adopt a live-for-the-moment attitude. If the future is uncertain, we focus on enjoying today. We want things that give us MORE:
We need time to be alone with ourselves, to slow down and be in the moment. (Image from blogthegood.tumblr.com)
We use technology to get more intense multi-sensory experiences - whether to expand them at huge events out or make them more inner and quietly sensual by unplugging completely. We make a daily appointment with ourselves to relax and slow down. We want to experience the world through our bodies and let our brains reach the REM of thought which the staccato rhythm of the internet steals from us. In fact, we want both extremes because one without the other defeats the intensity of both. And we want products that go beyond the ordinary form and function, and desire the addition of delight and emotional connection.
We want more intense multi-sensory experiences. (Image from Bloom Magazine)
We become more self-reliant. We grow our own food, or at least favour local. We appreciate hand-made artisanal things because they are unique, personal and honest. The hand is directly connected to the heart. We support companies and products we know to be ethical, like Merci in Paris that gives all its profits to a woman’s cause in Madagascar. We take responsibility as stewards of the world and our community, individually and as tribes.
We value our history, drawing on the past to help us with the future. We value our heritage and things handed down:
But we are less reverential than we once were. Products and design mine the past for comfort and emotional connections we get from the familiar, but we play with colour, scale and finish in ways that are sassy and fun. We use bold clashing colours as war paint to identify our literal or figurative tribe as we rebel against what we no longer believe in, or as team colours to identify causes or attitudes we support.
Women are responsible for 80% of all purchases in the Western world and are gaining more power and prestige in the work place. Balancing male ways of thinking with female ways makes companies stronger and more successful. Female values – empathy, cooperation, intuitiveness, creativity – are coming to the fore, partly because Generation Y, who are becoming equally powerful consumers, share many of those values. As authors like Daniel Pink say we have put way too much faith in the power of the left brain, which is analytical, verbal, and logical, systems based. We undervalue the right brain, which is creative and intuitive and holistic, rather than linear. It speaks through feelings, not words, which is why it has been harder for it to make its point. Girl power brings this into balance.
Foosball game in pink with female players, ICFF 2011. Women effect design in delightful ways.
Homes will not be staged to please some mythic guest with formal taste; they will be unstaged and the word ‘resale’ will disappear from the lexicon of good taste. If we live for today we become intelligently selfish about every inch of our living space. “I want what I want” – designers can help you get it. Rooms become a curated selection of the things we like, need and/or enjoy. I personally believe that rooms created this way, as an expression of who we are, look and feel better and those created according to rules of good taste. The time has come to thrive, to let loose, suck up the hard times and counter them by valuing family and friends, slow food and meaningful objects. Value your own voice, taste and ability to express it. Good design comes from the heart, and the heart, as we are learning, is that big and beautiful right-brain. Hallelujah!
Lion Girl, Melbourne. Japanese girls. Aida Fry, Brooklyn. The big trend will be MORE colour!
A beautiful room is designed not decorated. Decoration means adornment or ornamentation. Design, at its best, is about function handled beautifully. Good design is what Apple products and the humble brown paper bag have in common (note the little serrated top edge that prevents you from getting a paper cut). Nothing is frivolous, every detail is considered and a quiet beauty emerges from function driven form. This is why a beautifully designed room, chair or object will never go out of style while decorated things become dated period pieces.
Charles Eames sofa via Apartment Therapy
If I could afford it, my sofas would be designed by Antonio Citterio or Christian Liaigre and distilled so that design becomes almost invisible, felt as much as seen. Why are so many mid-century furniture pieces by the likes of Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen selling as much, if not more, now than when they were designed 80 years ago? It is because they represent aesthetically appealing solutions to everyday functions. No one will bang their knees on a Saarinen table base AND the marble top won’t stain and does not feel cold to the touch because of extra layers of lacquer. The beveled edge adds to the sculptural quality. His Womb Chair is as comfy as a big and beefy armchair but it is nimble, and light enough to turn to the window or pull up to a table rather than staying parked permanently in one spot. Buy well, buy once, and get pleasure forever. Good design is like an expensive bargain.
Eero Saarinen table via Oliver Yaphe
When I do colour, some might think this is surface not function and therefore entirely decorative. I disagree. Good colour is also about feel and function. I don’t decorate with it. I renovate! (In the up and coming weeks I will share with you how colour can be used to adjust scale and proportion to balance a space.) Most importantly, it balances energy levels, making a place feel calm or exciting and everything in between. Colour is about customizing physical space to fit the people. It is not about having fun with bold hits of hue. As Dieter Rams, designer for Braun, put it, “Good design is as little design as possible”. So when the son of a client said he knew I'd used 24 colours in his mum’s condo but he could only see twelve, I asked if it looked good. He said yes. I like to think that that’s good design.
Eero Saarinen wombchair via Style Estate
Suggested viewing on Dieter and the subject we just discussed is the documentary film, Objectified.
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