Colour, tents and street art
Sorting out old books today, I came across a small 1930s brochure praising the delights of Keswick on Derwentwater. The author Hugh Walpole’s foreword got me thinking: ”We love this place because it is a land of perpetual change. Rain it may but even at its most savage the change in sky and colour is perpetual. Colour? No small square of ground anywhere in the world holds such vivid colour..”
It reminded me of Coleridge’s wonderment as he wrote to a friend in 1800 about his view from Greta Hall, where he was living in Keswick:
“Here I am, with Skiddaw behind my back; on my left, and stretching far away into the fantastic mountains of Borrowdale, the Lake of Derwent-water; straight before me a whole camp of giants’ tents,— or is it an ocean rushing in, in billows that .. reach halfway to heaven?”
Both their comments over a century apart struck a chord with me that ripples wider. Changing colours and shapes – Coleridge’s tents were Barrow, Catbells and Causey Pike – feast the eye and imagination. This certainly is the tonic for me as I walk the hills, but these same characteristics apply elsewhere and in other contexts too. Just recently I shot a series of photos (below) of street art in Valencia, both old and new; and got the same buzz from its energy, colour, zany humour and vibrant engagement.
What’s more the artists recycle existing resources – walls, doorways, corrugated iron – for their canvasses, so there’s an environmental advantage too! Photo No 1 is of Neptune surrounded by maidens and pigeon. No 4 shows the lively face of a young woman on an 18th century dish at the National Ceramics Museum.
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