Walking over and around the wet Autumnal streets, great spots of golden light and glowing embers fall out of windows. Grey months scurry on, bloodshot with sunrises and sets the colour of scarlet wine.
Ingredients and where they come from are at the root of why and how we make our paint.
A home of one’s own
A small wooden house in a new suburb, on the edge of a ‘big’ city. Three kids, a dog, many cats, and a single mum working three jobs to keep our roof safe and warm. A pot-bellied stove for perpetual soup (and heat), twenty-seven fruit trees and a playhouse for mudpies and decorative exploits. Scrappy countryside, mostly peripheral towny. It was bike ride to swimmable water and the fish and chip shop, and an hour bus ride to anywhere vaguely cosmopolitan. It was my home for the first seventeen years of my life. Moving wasn’t an option, instead I just dreamed of moving to somewhere else.
By the age of ten, London was the goal. No other reason than a song I heard on the radio and a radical schoolteacher who told great stories of punks and politics, fashion and architecture – and living with a capital L. At ten everything is absorbed. I know what I do now and how I do it, is deeply informed by then.
Moving – house, city or country. Some of us are peripatetic by nature. Others have no choice. Can you imagine? A home of one’s own and a safe home is the very least we should expect. Warmth, food, community and beauty. To be able to nurture a house into our nest of dreams is joyful – almost spiritual. Choosing paint colours, shifting chairs from room to room, or designing a new kitchen are pleasures, not burdens and I hope we give these choices our respect. How lucky we are to have a sanctuary – a place where our horizons are limitless and our foundations firm.