Spring Green
It was a pleasure to write a piece for Konfekt magazine on the joy of Spring green. It’s a wondrous magazine which I really love.
I hope you enjoy reading below, or listening to the essay on their podcast.
There is a moment in a day sometime in the nothing-days of March, where everything loosens. The ground swells and we breathe in the new light.
Seasons talk in colour – and early Spring sighs green. That murmuring soft green that we humans have been waiting for. We know green lands and surges every year, but it always feels deeply hopeful, offering the much-needed confirmation of new life or the potential for a new way of living.
A fresh coat of paint is both a new colour and an optimistic beginning.
The glaucous and gleaming green that climbs out of the earth means we know life in general is about to get better. More light, kinder sunshine and fewer clothes – the first day you can open doors and step out on to fresh warm grass is a memorable day indeed.
We know that Spring arrives without fail – but we have such an emotive response to it when it finally does. As humans we have an acute sensitivity of place, space and seasons and so the wonder of shoots climbing out of the ground and buds swelling, means we are most definitely alive and ready to start again.
As the world gets more complicated and dark, the new life and fragile light in this particular type of green gives us hope. Spring Green has life in it. Rather than the sun-bleached green of late summer, there is a feminine undertone to early greens – pinks and a freshness at the core. It’s green that has just woken up, rather than ready to fade.
When I start to think about making a new colour or palette, I look to people, words and place. Colour represents an abstract quality in our emotions – it is a quality we sometimes don’t understand, but I try to put the nebulous into visual clarity – a feeling becomes a colour. We have a green in our collection called Piha Green. It relates to Piha beach on the West coast of Auckland. As a teenager, my friends and I would spend our last summer days here – the flax was bleaching out, sun waning and school was fast approaching. So Piha Green represents a longing and a readiness, as well as a visual reminder of what late summer sun feels like.
Other times it is people who inspire.
One of my favourite colours in our palette is Winifred Green. The colour itself is made up of five different pigments – mostly earth, but a whiff of magenta added ensuring its magical hue. I used magenta in the colour formula because of Winifred Nicholson, for whom I based the colour on. Most greens are a simple combination of yellow and blue, with black or white. But we mix paint colours like an artist, adding umber, magenta and ochre pigments into the formula for Winifred Green. The difference is palpable. Nuanced, alive and we hope a valid ode to this incredible painter.
Nicholson saw colour and light in a joyous and deeply loving way. Magenta was a colour she prized, hiding in plain sight within many of her paintings. I know I could have a made a colour that was representative of this, but the more I read about Winifred and researched her paintings, I felt that she was definitely green. She was a feminine, natural, domestic and optimistic green. A colour which I hope is a conduit to breathe in all the goodness of her work and views on life.
I believe that every home can be coloured in with the emotions and hopes of the right life for each of us. You just have to notice the change – a little like the seasons.
Welcome Spring and thank you Winifred.
