Thursday 22 August 2019

Paintbox


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!


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