This is an excerpt from Janice Linsday’s talk “Getting white Right” sponsored by Pittsburgh Paints at the Buildex show today in Vancouver;
“The night before I arrive at a clients home, I'm sure they dream about the colours they imagine I will push on them when I arrive at their house. That I'll arrive at the door and say, ‘OMG you are so colour deprived, step aside and let me fix it’.”
This she assured us, is not what we can expect (I have talked about this before—how a good colour designer also needs to understand neutrals). Janice said that choosing colours from the perimeter of the colour wheel is easy, it’s when you start going into the middle where the neutrals live that you can get into trouble. This part of the colour wheel is what my True Colour Expert Training is all about!
In one consultation the couple informed her they were either going to sell their house or they wanted to paint it purple. They went for purple and on all four floors of their home there is not an inch of white. Everything that would be white was instead a soft gray mauve.
They kept emailing her saying, we love it, come and see it and then they sent her a note:
“We can't tell you how happy we are in this house, we will never sell it, the people who come to visit who thought we were crazy to do 18 different shades of purple and a fuscia now call it the happy house and they love it too. It is strange to us that so many people want to live in beige and colourless homes now that we find ourselves so happy in our colourful house!”
“Workplaces studies have shown where there is lots of colour variety there is less absenteeism and better productivity. When men and women are in colourless rooms stress levels go higher than in coloured rooms and men experience higher levels of stress than women in these rooms."
"The reason for this is that white it not a natural colour and is actually the enemy to nature in many ways. Our responses to colours are coded in our DNA from the millions of years that it took for nature to evolve with us and this was our home."
“Natures colours are the right from which we see wrong. You would never look at a colour in nature and say 'that is so wrong' That floor colour [above] clashes with the house!”
We evolved in a world that was full of magnificent colour where there was very little white and colourlessness happened when things faded and died. Somehow we’ve gone from that world to one where 70% of all paint purchased is white. . .” Janice Lindsay
Janice is Pittsburgh Paint's spokesperson, we all received one of their fan decks and her book, All About Colour!
Related posts:
White is a Snob; Janice Lindsay
Interview with Colour Expert; Janice Lindsay
[Colour Theory] Rules are for Breaking by Janice Lindsay
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