Poor photo - Venice 1998 - but good colour to cheer me up in all this rain!

6/28

The colour of today has been typical for Sunday
Grey, a transparent, pale, mucky grey
boring and unattractive,
with nothing of the subtlety of blues or pinks.
Just another static Sunday
BUT
teatime redeems:

yellow fragrant rice
on blue-edged plate
on rich wine-red table cloth
- a visual colour-fest

first of twenty-eight

I was half thinking about doing some sort of colour-related post every day this month.
Today was a day of promising sunshine - falsely promising because now that the sun has gone down the sky  is clear and the temperature dropped.
I've been doing housework all day too (well, on and off - a bit of an exaggeration) - in anticipation of a friend coming for lunch tomorrow.

So - bright splashes of green and blue today, and the blue of the porch walls against the fresh white of the sills.

Paintbox

A multiplicity of memories on worn thin tissue, overlaid and frayed and torn around the edges, piled one on one, together building a layered grid of coloured squares, indistinct and hazy-edged. Jam jar of still-bubbled water, maroon painted handle sharp flaking under fingernails, sable bristles cruelly bent.

Square tin, a paintbox grid, each rectangle of colour named beneath, named and become a character, permeated by pigment, assembled into tales more vivid than any picture I can paint on cheap and bleeding paper which never fails to stain the page beneath. Rose Madder, inescapably the heroine, long before I heard of Tara, and Prokofiev- inspired Lieutenant Kijé: blue-uniformed, his cheekbones Prussian, jingling sleigh bells echoing across the snow. The villains: predatory Hookers Green (years before I heard of whores) or cowardly and caddish Cadmium yellow, headed for a Crimson lake. Siennas, Burnt and Earth, and Ochre – the names beloved but colours then thought oh so dull, create a castled landscape.