I decided to repaint several rooms in our house as a reward for decluttering (aka Kondo-ing) them – my Oreo Cookie brown studio, terra-cotta red dining room, and dark green master bedroom.
The dark earthy palette I saw on HGTV and TLC (think Trading Spaces) is wearing thin after 8 years. I’m ready to return to light and airy rooms, which will open up the space.
I thought this would be a relatively easy task since I had selected a limited palette. But there are so many shades of “white”! Over 50 in just one corner of the online Benjamin Moore chart for the white family.
Being an artist, people assume painting skills will translate into decorating skills. But I decided decorating is an acquired skill, at least for me.
Helpful Hint: The large 8 x 8 inch color sheets you see here can be ordered relatively inexpensively from this link at www.myperfectcolor.com. It certainly beat paying more money for sample size paint cans, brushes, and poster boards, not to mention the time and mess of painting everything. I confess to placing 3 orders so I could have duplicates of my final choices and put them around the room in different light and at different times of day.
I tried plain white, super white, warm creamy whites, cool whites, taupe whites, grays, blue-grey whites, creamy-grey whites. Who knew?
The answer is that Agnes Martin knew.
Paintings by Agnes Martin at the Guggenheim, Courtesy of artnet®news
Can you see why I was thinking about my color samples when I walked through this exhibit?
Agnes isn’t a decorator, however, but an artist who is having a retrospective (through January 11, 2017) at the Guggenheim Museum – itself a masterpiece of swirling whites.
This show feels like it was put together to showcase the spiral design of Guggenheim.
Agnes says that she wanted to paint emotions, just as joy, happiness, love, and peace. Clearly Agnes had a mystical and spiritual bent that belies her classification as a minimalist. And white has the connotation of purity, innocence and perfection, which brides traditionally wear. These paintings were among her late works.
Agnes Martin paintings, courtesy of the Guggenheim Museum
I walked away from this show with a new appreciation for the power of white. I also had many ideas of paintings for the huge wall in the master bedroom (non food too!), especially from her early less structured paintings.
What I learned from Agnes Martin is that white doesn’t necessarily have to have that feeling of sterility associated with hospitals and dental offices. Several friends warned me away from bright white rooms. But white can be warm, friendly and happy.
Do I dare paint my studio Super White to showcase my paintings? What do you think?
In color psychology, white is the color of new beginnings and wiping the slate clean. That just about sums it up. I’m ready for a clean slate, literally and figuratively. So wish me luck sorting through all the whites!
