Pitfall Colours | Discussion

At 52 I Have Decided My Favourite Colour is Yellow

Five decades of colour matching

Me in Marrekech 2015 wearing off-yellow (Image/Author)

If you’ve never read Bridget Stella Ruxton Wilson’s work, you should; it’s full of hard-won wisdom and plenty of home truths.

One of her recent pieces, entitled The Color of Happiness, was about how the colour pink has run through her life since childhood. From the colour of her bedroom at age 10 to dyeing her hair pink while working for a TV station in New Zealand.

Up until I read the piece, I don’t think I’ve ever thought about colour. I wear colour, but I rarely think about it, and it’s generally just what I happened to sling on that day.

But is there more to it than that? Maybe I’m drawn to a particular colour without knowing it.

Bridget’s father was an artist and so colour played an important part in her upbringing, and she used to buy him paints as a gift.

My father wasn’t an artist. My mother dabbled in crafts and amateur operatics, but sadly died when I was 8. My father managed a textile factory in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. I can’t remember what I bought my father for Christmas and birthdays, but it wasn’t paint.

My father didn’t have an artistic bone in his body. He liked football and beer, which is OK — so do I! But I also carried my mother’s artistic streak, as did my grandmother, who, in her day, was an actress on the West Yorkshire theatre scene.

Here she is with a friend circa 1960.

My grandmother and friend (Image/author)

People used to dress better than they do now. If you go around my local town here in France, most people dress in blue, grey and black. It’s the same in the UK. And if it’s not the colour, then it’s the style. Styles that are so homogeneous these days that it looks like everyone is wearing the same clothes.

I enjoyed literature and music growing up, but what I really wanted to do was paint. I’m a terrible painter, but I really wish I were good at it. I can stand in an art gallery for hours and be entranced.

I’ve got Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs as a screensaver and can stare at it for hours. Or sometimes Children’s Games, which is equally mind-blowing.

Children’s Games (1560) Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s (Wiki Comms)

And yet I’ve never really thought about colour before.

When I used to play in a band in the 90s, a mixture of progressive and psychedelic rock, we were obsessed with the 70s style and dressed accordingly. This was despite it being the era of curtain haircuts, smock jackets and Oasis.

This is a promo photo for a band I was in in 1997, so you can kind of get the look we went for. And this wasn’t just for the photo; we dressed like this all the time.

Jamshakcle 1997 (Image/Stan Mellema)

You can see we were into purple big time, but I also used to wear a lot of yellow. This is a photo of us playing. That mustard yellow shirt you can see, I wore a lot.

In fact, most of the time.

Jamshakcle 1997 (Image/Stan Mellema)

We used to share a flat together and I remember painting the walls an off-sunflower yellow, which looked more like sick.

Fast forward twenty-five years, and I found a picture of me wearing a yellow T-shirt that was made by the singer Justin, who is now a photographer in Barcelona.

The cockerel on the front of the T-shirt was photographed by him when he visited the farm where I work and live.

He made the T-shirt and sent it to me. This was me modelling it when it was new, trying to look as normal as possible.

Me modelling Le Coq (Image/Author)

Now the T-shirt is washed out and the cockerel faded, but I still wear it. I sent Justin a photo of it to complain about the shoddy workmanship and asked if I could have a refund.

He asked me how many times I had worn it.

I said, “Almost every day.”

I didn’t get a refund, but shortly afterwards bought this yellow electric guitar. It’s an Eart Guitar. They are great instruments and have a range of about 200 guitars in all sorts of colours. And yet when I saw them on their website, I immediately went for this one.

An Eart TE-45 (in yellow)

I also like yellow flowers like buttercups, celandines, dandelions, gorse, marsh marigold, yellow flag and forsythia. I live rurally and spend a lot of time looking at flowers.

Especially yellow ones.

Common daffodil (Image/Author)

Catsear (Image/Author)

Now I think about it, I really like yellow. And if I had to choose a colour that makes me smile, I think it would be yellow.

Or perhaps mustard yellow. Or even off-sunflower yellow that looks like sick.

How about you, what’s your colour?

[embed]What My Bedside Table Told Me About Getting Older Can our bedside tables reveal who we are?medium.com

(Note: someone asked if I had any Jamshakcle music. I do in Jamshakcle 1996–1998)