Y is for Yellow
Week Y | Wednesday | The pleasure palette
A very long time ago, I was discussing colour with someone, and said, “I’m not really into colours, I prefer black and white.” This is a clear memory and definitely happened but I look back on it with appalled disbelief. I also didn’t like birds at one time. Was I partly dead inside? Yikes. Or perhaps I was Dead Flat.
In the UK at least, Farrow and Ball paints are almost like a class issue. They’re pricey, and seem for some to represent a status move rather than something to be enjoyed for their own sake.
During my housesitting days I spent time in a Georgian house in Devon while it was on the market, its owners being in France. It was meant to be over a winter but the sale happened more quickly than expected – an offer went in the day I arrived, and I only spent five weeks there. Just as well, since the previous tenant had made away with the fridge and washing machine. It was unfurnished aside from what we’d organised for my camping out in one room. And it was haunted.
The tenant had illegally kept keys, and tried to break in one day, not knowing I was there. I wrote a short story about it. His chattiness on the doorstep to try and distract me from his trespass included bragging on how they’d repainted the entire house in Farrow and Ball. There’s a certain kind of English person who thinks that a virtue.
But I’m not going to let that put me off the love of colour I eventually developed, nor my love for the extremely matte – and, more recently, Dead Flat – paints of Farrow and Ball.
I used a colour of theirs in the only home I’ve ever actually owned, a tiny top-floor flat on Ninian Road in Roath, Cardiff, across from copper beech-surrounded playing fields and the entrance to the wonderful Roath Park. I only had it for about five years and had a terrible saga with a kitchen renovation. It was only really finished when I sold it to visit American roadside attractions. But one of the earliest things I did in it was to paint the bedroom in a Farrow and Ball paint called Sugar Bag Light. They stopped selling it for a while, but I see it’s back on the menu now. Smashing.
It looked quite a lot bluer on my walls, most of the time, than it looks on their site. But the wonderful thing about their matte paints is the depth achieved in them, so that the relationship between pigment and light is endlessly changing depending on time of day and weather. It was like having moving art in that nook of a room, which could only just fit a double bed, an old wardrobe, a small chair, and a bedside table. The roof and ceiling sloped in two different ways, further reducing the room’s utility.
This meant one narrow but tall window overlooking the beeches and the park, and another tiny one low down to the right of that. I put a low old basket chair by the latter, and it was my goddaughter Lucy’s favourite place to be when she visited. She was small enough to stand at the low windowsill looking at trees and rugby players; it was perfectly Lucy-sized, then.
The windows gave just enough light to let it work its magic on the paint. Sometimes it was like being in an arboreal forest, sometimes underwater and, at night, in a cave that was a warm hug.
It’s a strange thing, since being creative is so natural a part of being human (unless you’re a fascist), but it can take a long time to realise and accept you’re creative unless you’re lucky enough to grow up in a home filled with creativity, leading you by example. You encounter many clues but it can take a long time to see them as that. Decades, in some cases.
Early memories.
🎨 Staring at felt tip pens lined up in a row, entranced by their colours.
🎨 Ditto my Fuzzy Felts, especially the ‘fantasy’ set with its black background.
🎨 Being laughed at by a cousin for colouring ‘outside the lines’, and my soul telling me that was the wrong take.
🎨 My Uncle Derek visiting from Canada, and us going to the shops at Merseyway in Stockport town centre. I was, I think, seven. One shop sold paints, and it was the first time I’d seen the paper strips of colour samples. I filled my pockets with them but was told off for it – all but a few were taken away and returned. I was obsessed with those I was left with, both the colours and the names.
🎨 At around the same time, I was allowed to have my small bedroom painted purple. I’d heard it was Donny Osmond’s favourite colour. We moved to Canada from that house in 1975. When I visited it in 2015, I found it still lived in by the people who bought it from my parents, who kindly let me look around. A surprising amount was unchanged. My old bedroom, now an office, had of course been redecorated a less lurid colour, but you could still see the purple under the chipped white gloss paint on the built-in cupboard. I just told Donny that on Twitter yesterday, funnily enough.
My favourite paint brand in my favourite artspace in the world, there.
Farrow and Ball makes ‘posh paints’. But I make no apology for loving them. They represent such craftsmanship, beauty, pleasure, and also history.
I’m more likely to source colours digitally nowadays, spending quite a bit of time experimenting with hex codes. I love that you can capture a colour you like with a photo or screenshot and there are websites that will tell you the code from your image.
I discovered these Farrow and Ball videos on the Inigo website while researching for last week’s Friday post for paid subscribers, about a remarkable artist using an endangered technique. I’ve ‘stolen’ that site’s dusty rose for use in my own projects.
So I guess after all I’m something I just learned today from the Farrow and Ball YouTube channel: a chromologist. Or perhaps a chromatophile?