There must be a special place for color in my hippocampus. In yours too.
It springs into action when a color instantly summons up your first car, an ex girlfriends dress, boyfriends jacket, or the sleeve of a cherished LP. Sometimes, it’s two juxtaposed colors, reminding you of a railway station you used to use, or a Grace Kelly outfit in Rear Window.
It's a kind of PROUSTIAN magic.I don’t think I knew all that back when I was painting beach houses on Long Island, and travelling into the city to restock at PEARL PAINTS arranged over five floors in Lower Manhattan, Pearl had been serving everyone since the 1920s from jobbing house painters to artists like Pollock, Jasper Johns, Warhol, Elsworth Kelly and David Byrne, and treating them all just the same. It’s luxury apartments now of course, but let’s not get into that.
But what I had begun to realise was that I really liked paint, and specialist shops with time for everyone. Which made that John Travolta line in Saturday Night Fever – “There must be more to life than working in a paint store” – problematic.It seemed like a noble calling to me.
I’d heard that Amsterdam was the world’s capital of paint, so I left New Amsterdam for the old one, here I met a man described to me as a rock n roll paint maker, Hans Luiken, I was not let down by a 6"5' man in leather pants and rather than a desk, a drum kit in his office with a mural of David Bowie and one of Keith Richard. With his help I developed, my first paint brand, Siècle.
Later after a brief hiatus, I made a ramshackle premises in South London our home, a building so long that one end was in Peckham the other in East Dulwich. In the Peckham end we'd run occasional screenings of cinematic celebrations of color, like the Umbrellas of Cherbourg. We installed a messy spinning paint wheel where kids could create their own technicolor masterpieces and housed a gallery for Camberwell graduates and local artists to exhibit.
Most of all,I just wanted it to be a shop you could drop into and share significant color-inspired moments of the kind you’re unlikely to get in a chain store. And go home with a headful of colors you instinctively liked, rather than those dictated to you by institutionalised ‘good taste’.
People tell me I make choosing colors for their home fun.
That’ll do for me.
SIMON MARCH, COLORVILLE COLOURMAN
