This post, I suppose, is following on from my one of my previous posts about the subconscious mind (Blog 16th Oct). I realised again the power of our subconscious while I was ironing a top - it has the same colour palette that I’m currently using for a couple of exhibition submissions! It doesn’t just happen with clothes, it extends to the yarns I knit with, also fabrics and soft furnishings.
I came across this photo (while scrolling through my photos for the one you can never find!), which was taken a couple of years ago at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. I had no idea at the time that I was wearing the perfect matching dress to Picasso’s interpretations of Velázquez’s ‘Las Meninas’. These studies are a favourite of mine, and so I wonder if my subconscious mind was at work while out shopping for a couple of summer dresses - not usually worn here in Scotland!
The other oddity is green. I’ve noticed that greens have become a wee bit dominant recently in my work. I do paint landscapes, so yes green will be there, but not all landscapes are green. I love to see golden fields of crops, dark browns and blacks of freshly ploughed fields, and rich autumnal oranges and yellows. If I was asked what my favourite colour was, my answer would be blue, and yet I never really use blue as blue. My favourite cerulean blue is, more often than not, mixed with cadmium yellow to make a zingy lime green!
Autumn is my favourite time of the year. I love to be out walking amongst the rusty coloured leaves that crunch under your feet. Yet I don’t have any deciduous bushes in the garden, everything is green! The flowers are mostly pinks, purples and violets, not a yellow or orange in sight!
It’s certainly ‘food for thought’ that our subconscious mind does creep into everything we do, particularly with colour. I recently had a tidy of my acrylics and found an unused tube of cadmium orange, so I pushed myself (I didn’t want to!) to experiment with it. The result was a semi-abstract landscape which also incorporated blues. It certainly was a push outside of my green comfort zone, and I am really pleased with it, however, I'm now back to my ‘normal’ palette!
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