Happy Thursday, folks 👛🌺🌈🛍🎀🌈💕🌸🌈
I don’t remember a time when I didn’t love colour. It’s ALWAYS been about colour: it’s just taken me decades to realise it, like finally seeing the light and falling for someone who has quietly adored you all your life (just imagine…). Like many of you, no doubt, I’ve been through black phases (post-divorce, post-other major losses), and times when I thought I could be ‘sensible’ and do beige interiors and grey jumpers. But these have been an aberration, part of a process to be passed through, only to emerge, in time, out the other side, colour-doused and triumphant. Whatever your colour preferences, folks, it’s about being real. There are no rules, other than the need to listen to what colours make you truly happy. Colour, kitsch, clashing patterns, insane pairings – not everyone’s bag but that’s personally what makes ME happy. Over the years, colour-fuelled events shine out like beacons, guiding lights, telling me ‘These are the things that matter to YOU!’ Like buying so many textiles in India when I was 18 that I had to send them on a slow ship home (air mail would have bankrupted me). Like visiting Charleston farmhouse when I was 20, with its free-form murals and painted furniture, and never wanting to leave. Or watching Baz Lurman’s Romeo & Juliet with its impossible neon vibrancy and feeling, at the age of 25, almost sick with the need for my world to be that colour-filled (don’t even get me started on the fish tank scene…pure distillate of romance). These are what have made me feel alive. I recently chanced upon a book about the incredible #irisapfel (bottom left) and realised, for the first time ever, that I’d found my role model (‘Colour can raise the dead’). She has emboldened me: from now on I shall never shy away from colour. Even breakfast should be spectral (thanks @kaleidoscope_uk for the beautiful floral toast). How does colour make YOU feel? I’d love to know. Catch you later.
Martha, The Colour File x
