Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Forecast: A Big Time Return To Color !

David Easton for Carroll Petrie, New York
While some of us never stopped loving color, bright, bold, clear color~  in all of its glorious guises, others of us perhaps due to fashion and technology, have worshiped at the shrine of grey, fifty million shades of grey!Grey is a color, and beige is too...just because it's not bright and punchy doesn't mean it's not a color(or colour as anglophiles prefer)
You know, I resided in Manhattan for about 12 or so years, and those long winters can be awfully dreary...one yearns for the Spring daffodils and tulips to pop up along Park Avenue, I do recall returning one winter from a Caribbean holiday, and being inspired to paint my kitchen on E. 90th street a pretty yellow, which looked great with the black and white diamond floor.  We added some forced narcissus, and enjoyed the heavenly fragrance all Winter...what fun!  The trick to using stronger colors, such as the glazed yellow above, is to do so with a sense of authority and quality.  Georgina Fairholme was a master colorist~ her lime sitting room at Kips Bay was a sensation.  Even Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis thought so, and hired her to help out with some of her decorating...on the Vineyard 
  Besides architect Jacobsen, Jackie has hired Georgina Fairholme, an English interior decorator who favors rosy decors, to help furnish the house. In her pre-White House days, Jackie was not known for exemplary home-making. "I was appalled at her housekeeping," columnist Maxine Cheshire has said. "Some slipcovers in the drawing room were shrunken and out of shape. The cording of JFK's favorite chair had obviously not been washable and the mulberry color had run like lipstick smears. The curtains were filthy, and so were the windows." But under the tutelage of Mrs. Paul Mellon, Jackie turned over a new leaf.
(excerpted from People magazine)

As my late, great, Professor Stanley Barrows, always said ~look to Matisse for the brilliance of color, and bask in the beauty of it, use it as an inspiration for your work with clients.
"When down by the sandy shore I can think of nothing I want more Than to live by the booming blue sea As the seagulls flutter round about me. "
—Jacqueline Bouvier, age 10 "