Skip to main content

The World's Favourite Colour



I've been moving this amaryllis around the house for a couple of weeks, hanging on to it so that I could make a still life. However my life has been anything but still and I've just not had the time. Over the intervening weeks it has changed, decayed and actually become more interesting, more sculptural.

Like all my recent pictures the subject was planted and grown by me, nurtured on the windowsill, my winter garden. I construct an improvised daylight studio in my home and have lots of coloured backgrounds, enjoying the process of styling and building the still life. Strangely after I'd made these photographs I discovered that the background I used here is called Marrs Green, recently pronounced The World's Favourite Colour by paper makers GF Smith after an online survey. Aptly it was inspired by the Scottish landscape and Caroline Till, the editor of Viewpoint Colour Magazine, suggested the shade's success was down to people wanting to reconnect with the natural world.

"As the contemporary condition of 'nature deficit' rises in the context of increasingly urban and digital lifestyles, we seek to reconnect with the natural world, hence the current global popularity of the colour green," said Till.


Perfect

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Lovely Pair of Pins

I knew the expression 'pins' referring to legs but had to Google what the Cockney rhyming slang comes from. It looks like 'pins & pegs', but there are some great alternatives like 'bacon & eggs' and 'dolly pegs'. I think I might start trying to incorporate more Cockney into my everyday speak, I do have London roots but they are more South  (Saff)  London than East London, where I think it originates.  Anyway this is all to illustrate a new picture that sits quite neatly with an older picture. So brogues, legs and a sea view from my two main muses. This might be turning into a set...  Oh by the way the top view is Morecambe Bay and the lower image is from The Wirral looking across towards Wales. The North West of England is a beautiful place, with some stylish residents. 

Linda McCartney Video Commission

If you'd like to access my cyanotype video workshops, they are still live on The Walker Art Gallery website: Cyanotype prints for beginners Advanced cyanotype prints

Exquisite Corpse

I've gathered this project together here, although it really just started as instagram posts and me keeping myself entertained/ creative through the early weeks of the pandemic. On reflection, although it looks visually different from my usual work (black and white rather than a focus on colour) the themes that emerge are similar. This is how I've made sense of it: These images are inspired by the exquisite corpse parlour game first played by the surrealists around the time of the 1918 pandemic. In my interpretation each picture is a self-portrait made up of my silhouette and graphic elements found on my Lockdown daily walks in the suburban landscape around me. Living alone I soon realised the only human form I was seeing on a regular basis was my own shadow. I started making these images using my phone camera and a selection of simple apps at the beginning of the first Covid Lockdown and continued until things returned to some kind of normality in mid...