Certain mornings come cluttered at all. There are messages to be read before breakfast, engines are clattering outside the window and the mind runs before it has any proper reason to do so. Any language, the mute speech of pastel color, which the Chinese know as He Xie Fen Cai, or harmonious pastels, in those times seems the laying aside of some burden. Blush pinks fall on walls like first light. Powder blues are in corners without leave taking. The lilacs are soft and do not scream. they are colors which do not need to fight with your nervous system. They haggle with it, and hint politely that the hurry may be postponed, that you may take your seat, and that, contrary to what you thought, you desire to. Click here!
Softness does have one strength concealed within it. Neon demands. Crimson commands. But some old sage or some old periwinkle will only be there, waiting and waiting. Nail a white mint canvas over a working-table and feel a thing in the chest loosen. Take a dull peach coverlet and overlay an empty chair and see how an icy room can be made to be a place to stay. Soft hues don’t perform. They support. They are not ornamental and more like a trusted companion, which does not demand any effort on your part.
One of my friends once painted her whole apartment when she was having a hard time of several months. Past: solid and stately walls made of charcoal, but gradually suffocating. After: warm buttercream bridged with lavender coloured art. In the room she had just completed, she laughed rather and told him that it was like she was able to breathe at last. She was about to appear ashamed of it. She shouldn’t have been. Color does not remain on the walls, but slips inwards, into some part behind the sternum, changing the quality of the common time. The science of it deals with wavelengths and psychological reaction. Its lived experience entails relief. Both versions are true.
In a world that values opposition and angularity, the decision to go soft has a mute form of rebellion. It is the walk rather than the run, the window opened rather than the screen re-opened. Soft colors soften the masculine angle of a room and, in slight accretion, something in us reacts. The tension in the shoulders bursts a fraction. The rate of thinking is slowed down to a sufficient extent. It turns out that peace does not necessarily make itself heard in a dramatic way. More frequently it is worn in pale rose and powder blue, is seated in the light available, and remains,–impatient, unobtrusive, as one who knows when it is best to keep quiet.