I’m all excited and
gooey, ooh!
Fresh new paints!
There’s
over £100 worth of them here, can you believe it? But it was time I treated myself and I've been motivated by a particularly inspiring commission which is currently re-energising me too, at last. I may write more about that later. In the meantime, just look at these most delightful little
half pans in their individual wrappers, they remind me of lovely old-fashioned sweets (I'm thinking fragrantly fruity chewy ones, or perhaps those hard ones with the sugary shards that almost slice through your tongue.)
They’re so perfect I
don’t want to open them but at the same time, oh I crave, I need, their contents. Each one a different, exotic flavour. I mean colour. Whilst part of me wants to resist even touching them, I will gently pull away the wraparound paper
label, then the cellophane, to reveal the glorious pigment itself, so neat in
its little half pan box. Pristine, its
surface so smooth, it looks good enough to lick! The cute miniature container with the name of
the hue in the teeniest tiniest print (about 1mm high?) on the side is like a tiny
dolls’ house cake tin. A tiny dolls’
house cake tin with a psychedelic loaf in it. Delicious. I think I’m a watercolour half pan fetishist.
So I love them: all shiny, new and unused, ready to be
ritually unwrapped and lusted after, and then… well, things get wild. It gets messy, uncontrolled,
spontaneous. I misbehave and mistreat
them. My beautiful box set ends up looking like this.
Granted, this selection is at least ten years old. These paints really do last.
Anyway, that’s my thing. A fresh new paintbox. What’s yours? The perhaps
unlikely, innocent thing that gives you a special hard-to-explain little thrill
when you see it first in its pristine condition? A new book perhaps, oh the
smell of the paper, the stiff cover yet to be folded, the spine yet to be
bent? Or a big bar of chocolate, tempting you with
the sparkle of its smooth metallic foil wrap, almost too mesmerising to open? Perhaps a toolbox? Or a pack of vacuum cleaner bags? (Getting silly now.) Of course, records always did it for me too,
big time. The shiny vinyl and immaculate
grooves, the unchartered B-side of a new single, when every purchase promised a
voyage of discovery. CDs don’t quite
have it, although almost - I can still get that flutter when first exploring a fold-out
inner. And notebooks still do it for me –
notebooks and sketchbooks, their blank pages exciting and daunting in equal
measure. Long may we enjoy such nuances!
Of course, there's only one song that I really should post now, and brilliant to see with a promo film too.
Pink Floyd: Paintbox
PS - Apologies for quietness around these parts lately too, just one of those things!