Walking over and around the wet November streets
Walking over and around the wet November 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.
Flowerbeds have languished, red climbs out of the beech trees and the Hunter’s moon rises. Red lips and rosy cheeks replace ruddy apples and juicy tomatoes. The palette of life changes to one of glittery, sharing space with glowing.
We begin our seasonal shift to inside living – both of place and mind. Late Autumn and early Winter is the most natural season to think of decorating. We are always inside our home; the light is beautiful, and we have a perceived hard stop of one year ending and a new one beginning. We have burrowed down into our kitchens and beds. Our ovens serve us casseroles and sticky, hot puddings. We want our living rooms to cosset us with through our Netflix binges. The thought of eating an icy salad makes us shiver. A crisp blue bedroom, unless seasoned with warmer hues, does the same. As with food, we want our homes to feel rooted, warm and to wrap us up like babies in a blanket of colour.
I think of red as love – love being a wild bouquet of emotions. It is power and sex, and the heat of hearts broken and full. It can be the fires of hell or Christ’s blood. The rousing behind a social movement or an energetic impulse. It is psychologically complex like no other colour. Which makes it very easy to choose as a lipstick (sex/love/power), but very hard to choose for your home (nurture/safety/joy).
For me, it is even harder to make – as when I make a new red all these complexities weigh in. Clean reds vibrate and can be terrifying to live with. There is a reason you eat quickly in fast food restaurants – they are oft wrapped in violent contrasts of primary colours, which always includes a hard red. We would linger over our burger and fries if we were encased in soft pink walls. Instead, we scoff and go.
Red was the first colour that humans mastered and reproduced. Prehistoric cave paintings show man’s ability to create magic with red earth. This is where I sit with red, rather than with the Renaissance painters. Instead of showcasing their creative impulses, they highlighted the power player in a group portrait, through their deft use of red. Look at me instead of look at this.
I prefer to make slow, and if possible, quiet reds. Reds peppered with many pigments – mostly oxide based, so that they feel warm, ancient, and very human. I want our reds to ease the difficulty of being red, and instead feel like a tasty tomato soup or good glass of Malbec – preferably together.
Our colour della Casa does just this. Conceived as a ‘of the house red’, its complexity becomes very simple to live with, and it is one of our most successful colours. I often wonder whether this is because it feels recognisable – the same as someone you love.
Recently we were commissioned to create a bespoke colour for Francis Gallery. As part of a rebrand they wanted to change their gallery to red walls. It seems bold but it was, again, very simple.
The colour was there to evoke the feeling of pat juk or red bean, an important symbol of the founder’s Korean heritage. Standing in the newly painted room brought a rush of emotion and blood - and hope. It felt powerful, but also right.
Red is a love of a warm, eager living life and red is very human.
Cassandra x
Written for Konfekt