THINKING ABOUT... INTERIOR COLOURS

What is it about the colours that make up our world so very difficult  for people to live with? Everyday, in almost every way, we are experiencing  a very colourful world, from our early morning jog to our late evening activity:  from  our commercial spaces to our retail spaces, from our workplaces to our leisure places,  and from  our green spaces to our indoor spaces. Yet to choose  to live with any one of these familiar colours seems to be no easy task.  
             

Yves Klein , the French artist working in the 1950's , responded to his external stimuli by creating his own cosmic colour, IKB,  which he splattered on  blank canvas, human  body, and everyday objets.  To him, this intense monochromatic blue  was symbolic of  his mystical connection to his universe, and it was his filtering  lens  through which he saw  the contradictory notion of art expression and personal expression, how our interiority defines our responses to our exteriority.    His trademark cobalt  blue was his way of satirizing the idea of meaning in abstract art and sabotaging the viewer's need to find  such meaning: the artistic brushstroke is a gestural joke for we all bring  to the work of art our own set of limiting ideas and  expected notions. Only when we are free from these cultural restraints and see simply "the void" can we assume to understand our responses and learn from them.


And so too with our colour choices. When we challenge the expected "how to" underpinnings of an interior space, such as using  white mouldings and white doors as the  surefire contrast to paint colour, then our challenges to expected notions  set us free to use colour choice as our own personal path to freedom  of expression.