Me and bright colours
If this sounds like a confession, it is probably because it is one. Sort of. I find bright colours irresistible. And given a chance, I’ll go to town with them. Like I did years ago, when the interior of my home was gutted and rebuilt. New plasterboards covered every wall. Two months later, a friend remarked that he wouldn’t like to wake up in my place after a heavy night on the turps. He was surrounded by a kaleidoscope of colour. A lilac front passage opened into a canary yellow lounge room which gave way to a sky-blue kitchen. When he passed through the kitchen he arrived at the watermelon family room. The bedrooms were burnt orange and deep blue. Even the bathroom wasn’t spared: mustard tiles on a dark green wall. My friend never slept over at my place. He wasn’t a close friend anyway.
When I tried to sell that house a few years later, people who came through on open days actually applauded its appearance. But I didn’t get a single offer. And not a single bid at the auction. But after a month I negotiated a price and got it off my hands. I drove past the place the following year. The blinds were down and I was able to see that the canary yellow lounge room and sky blue kitchen had been off-whited over. I suspect every other room had been similarly degraded. I realised my penchant for bright colours is not universally shared. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be a minority affliction.
I have never tried to paint a house again. It’s the sort of back-breaking work one does only once in a lifetime. Unless one is a professional house painter or a masochist. But my addiction to bright colours is as permanent a part of me as the colour of my eyes or the shape of my feet. And it seeks expression, it demands feeding and satisfying.
This year I studied painting for one semester at RMIT. It is RMIT’s policy to get each of its students to do one elective outside the domain of their course. Once I got past the tentative efforts of returning to art after, let’s see, thirty five years, I discovered an outlet for my addiction that will last the rest of my life. As much as I love painting urban and rural landscapes, I am always looking for opportunities to sneak in a bright yellow or blue or orange or red, no matter that it isn’t part of the original setting I am trying to capture. The result is a stylised reproduction somewhere between real and abstract. Maybe my painting niche resides in this nether world. You can see that nether world in the Instagram section of this blogsite.
Gerry Roberts 