conversation stoppers: things to say to those who wander by while you’re painting
“If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.”-vincent van gogh/ “Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.”- friedrich nietzsche/ “Colour is a power which directly influences the soul.”- wassily kandinsky/“I dream my painting and I paint my dream.”- vincent van gogh/ “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.”- henry ford/ “If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.”- honore de balzac/ “The devil is not as black as he is painted.”- dante alighieri /“Speak softly, but carry a big can of paint.” – banksy/ “I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.”- charles baudelaire/
it does no good to think this while painting, but good luck not thinking it now:
the extremely many charts of munsell color theory
actually useful:
gardenista regularly surveys architects for their go-to exterior paint colors. here are black and white and grey and red and green. also, stain.
debbie zimmer at the paint quality institute has a blog, and she is not fooling around.
laurel bern’s done the eye-gouging work of translating farrow and ball colors to benjamin moore (works vice-versa, one presumes).
this color iq test does not judge how smart a color is, but rather how well you see color.
there’s only one great book on choosing exterior paint colors that i know of, but it’s so good that no more are needed: ‘house colors’ by susan hershman. (that ‘america’s painted ladies’ series is both everywhere and lurid, and has inspired many terrible choices.)
lessons i’ve learned about painting:
‘paint it a color, not a flavor.’
‘wash your paintbrush until you’d be willing to drink the run-off.’
‘prep twice; paint once.’
‘painting swatches takes more time than anything, except repainting.’
sure to fall on deaf ears, perspective:
“The house is the stage set for the drama we hope our lives will be or become. And it’s much easier to decorate the set than to control the drama or even find the right actors or even any actors at all. Thus the hankering for houses is often desire for a life, and the fervency with which we pursue them is the hope that everything will be all right, that we will be loved, that we will not be alone, that we will stop quarreling or needing to run away, that our lives will be measured, gracious, ordered, coherent, safe. Houses are vessels of desire, but so much of that desire is not for the physical artifact itself.”
-rebecca solnit, from ‘the encyclopedia of trouble and spaciousness’
(the more serious first part of this series is here, and the second one is here.)