Colourful?

 

I love colour. I'm fascinated by it, by the interplay of colours, the strong contrasts of the primaries and secondaries, the subtleties of all the wonderful colours you get when you mix two colours on opposite sides of the colour wheel, or the muted shades of what I have recently learned are called chromatic greys.

And yet, in my clothes and in my art, I use colour very little. Most of my winter clothes are black (although there is usually a bit of red somewhere). In the summer it's blue and white, because black is too hot - that's when we get a summer.

In the textiles I make my fallback colours are black, white and magenta. (You maybe able to see a pattern here.) The work I am making for my upcoming Degree Show is cream or brown or black - chosen to be reminiscent of skin colours without being too literal. But having been working in these colours for nearly two years now, I am beginning to dream of moving into colour - I am attracted to the strong colours and stylised flower shapes of Eastern European or South Amercian embroidery. Something bright, cheerful, and totally without any deeper meaning!