A Colorist’s House

A Colorist’s House

Playing House with Colors

I love to play house. I just can’t believe it sometimes! I am all grown up and can set up a house the way I want to? 

It seems unreal somehow. And it is. In the sense of the Real things, the truly important things, it IS just play acting. For, by my definition, Real Things last forever. So these supposedly real, grown up things, are just toys and games to my artist brain, which is quite childlike. In a way, I am designing a kind of stage set for the theater of life.

So but here I am, fixing up an old house in just the way I would like! It is of course practical, but also, whimsical. It is aspirational, even symbolic, and with an activist dimension. It is the kind of thing you might expect when an artist plays house.

It is the colors you will notice first when you walk in. The stairs and hallway leading up to the second story dwelling, and the landing at the top, are white walled, with black trim. A neutral straight passage. But as soon as you get up there, wow, you see colors in the four directions. 

A bedroom on your left is glowing with a warm and inviting pink. I have dyed the curtains pink as well as painting the walls pink. When the outside light comes in, you are bathed in a wonderful pink glow as the light filters through the curtains. Though not a screaming pink, it is not bashful either. This makes me feel roses. And new beginnings. And love, security, coziness and comfort. So, I get some rose prints for the walls. 

The next room is as blue as the pink room is pink. The effect offers a blue light experience with the walls sky blue, illuminated by curtains I have dyed just the right amount of blue to bring in the light, but fill the space with blue sky peace. So I add cloud feature. (Maybe star stickers too, that glow in the dark?)

The bathroom is alive with butterflies. Monarch butterflies on the wall and shower curtains, and the space is trimmed in black and orange. The old, plastic, originally white, shower walls are hopelessly discolored with an orange tinge, so I just decide to go with it. We hang a nontoxic, neon orange shower curtain up, creating an amazing warm glow. Orange is always a friendly light to a naked body.

It turns out that the butterfly peel off sticker wall paper can be cut out to make individual butterflies. My four year old assistant and I watch as the butterflies get loose and  fly off. Soon they begin to appear on walls all around the house. On the tree. On the roses. Up in the sky of the blue room. Many land at four year old eye level.

This old house has some seventy year old sequoia trees nearby, smiling in through the windows, giving the impression, up here on the second floor, that one is in a tree house. So the kitchen is of course, green. Green walls, green curtains, infused with some sunny yellow. This is a veganish, green minded place of food. A kitchen for a plant based cuisine. I paint a tree mural on the wall, in the transition between living room and kitchen. I wonder if it should have fruit on it? Seems appropriate for a passage into the veganish kitchen.

The living room is a delicate lavender with green and white curtains covered with verdant vine patterns. A kind of spiritual neutral, open to the possibilities of the day; designed to contrast with the sequoias outside. There is green in curtains and couch, and this will also be a room where rainbows flourish. A living room is where you live, right? The full spectrum of possibilities.

The ceiling all throughout is newly refreshed, with a coat of white paint, that serves to convey the color and light in each room. It is a slightly warm white that nevertheless cools off in the light of the blue room. The door frames and window frames are also white: they carry the light energy and vibration of sky. 

But the electrical socket covers, and light switch covers, as well as the molding trim encircling all around the house along the wood floor, holds to the Earth, are painted in a warm brown. Grounding. Tree roots.

It is its own little world, this tree spirited house I am playing in.

“You must never stop being whimsical!” -Mary Oliver