Summer (Dec) 2024
What do I mean by the ‘Summer of Colour’?
This series of work is a celebration of the colours of Summer and the fact that they vary from year to year. Some years, the summer is wet and windy and may even throw in a cyclone or two. The light is different, the native bush is more subdued and everything seems to have a grey tinge. Other summers see weeks (sometimes months) of hot, dry weather resulting in serious droughts, drastically impacting on our farmers and growers. The light has a heat shimmer to it and there is a shift from green to gold.
If we’re lucky, we get a balance of both, and this is when the hot sunny days encourage us out to the beach, where the blues and greens are brighter and deeper. After a few days of dry weather, when the environment around us starts to look a little tired, the rain washes the dust off everything and the colours are more intense.
For this series, I wanted to capture as many of the colours as possible because I believe we need them all, to enable us to appreciate each of them in turn. It fascinates me when I hear someone say, I wish every day was sunny and hot. You need to have felt cold before you appreciate the benefit of hot and vice versa. You can’t appreciate light if you’ve not experienced total darkness.
Colour works the same way. Putting one colour next to another can sometimes lift them both to another level. Nature does it to perfection. Humans not so well!
And colour definitely affects our mood. It is a worthwhile experiment to undertake … select a piece of artwork in a colour pallete you like and try it in a room in your home (where you go to relax) for a couple of weeks. Notice how you feel about it when you walk in the room. Now change the artwork for a piece with different colours. Now how do you feel?
Once you learn how different colours affect you, either relaxing you, energising you, irritating you or depressing you, then you can stay clear of some colours and use certain colours in rooms to match how you want to feel - including at work!
Colour impacts on our moods and thoughts in the same way music does - we are just probably more aware of the influence of music - but they both have a surprising influence on our mental health and we have the potential to manage that influence. Worth thinking about?