Hue and Cry
Why Does Seattle Have Such a Color Problem?
courtesy of the virginia Inn
COLOR ON TRIAL If only all crucifixions could be this fabulous.
Tools
"There's enough green here! There's enough blue! Paint your house purple!" Rolon Bert Garner charges, expending valuable oxygen in the few minutes he gets between inhaler treatments for his chronic pulmonary disease. "Just loll in color," he says, and then the veteran Seattle artist rests. Garner is a painter. He uses colors that polite Northwestern culture would consider either gauche or the tools of a madman. This is on purpose. Why? "Just being anti-Northwest for years and years and years," Garner says.
Garner is talking about that old Seattle aesthetic: foggy gray, woolly blue, fuzzy green, shady brown. The colors that pass for colors in Seattle's built environment are beyond muted. They are life-sucking. Pale. Apologetic. Drained. Draining. Color that's actually the opposite of color, says a writer I know. There is no known reason for this phenomenon. In climatically comparable Ireland, saturated colors live and breathe as freely as any other citizens of the spectrum, not only in villages but along Dublin streets. In Seattle, you'd starve if you needed to eat color. Everything is... respectable. Not too LOUD. Is it to do with respecting nature? Not the human nature that lived here originally, but, you know, Nature. Nature in green, blue, gray, and brown. Is that why every paint job is a pale imitation of earth, trees, sky, and water?
Stranger Personals
Artists have color wisdom. On her blog in 2010, color-happy Seattle painter Susanna Bluhm wrote, "Throughout art, history, and literature, color is associated with base desires, sex, the feminine, intellectual decay, loss of control, fall from grace." Bring it on, and drunkenly, says Garner. Color is a form of local rebellion (I always chuckle at the name of Pike Place Market gallery Local Color). In Seattle, color almost always seems to take the form of excess, of breaking out. Take Chihuly. Take EMP. Because Garner has spent most of his life promoting the art of other people—he has mounted shows by at least a thousand artists in this city since the 1970s—most people have never seen his actual art. This month is his first solo show in three decades, at the Virginia Inn. The paintings date back to 1969 and up to 2011. Most involve naked women: one with American flag underwear stretched down around big thighs. One submerged in a bathtub so only her curvy legs stick meatily out. Three nudes crucified. One pulls a dress back on under a thought bubble that reads "Oh, Lord, I hope that's got rid of him for the night." Their unifying sensibility is their color: like American pop painter John Wesley, but darker, garish, swollenly fruity, comic-bookish. Pop was never very Seattle. It's Seattle "alternative," rather.
Of all the art in the city right now, the most eye-poppingly bright is the vast mural of orange and pink on the northernmost wall of Seattle Art Museum's third floor. It's searing. The artist is Yayoi Kusama. She wears a wig of maraschino-cherry-red hair and is world famous for making bright art. The point of exhibiting her works at SAM is to remind people she had her very first solo exhibition in the United States here in Seattle, back in December 1957. Then again—the paintings she showed here have titles like Rock Spirit. Rock Spirit is the color of falling sand. Rainy. Noncolor.
Seattle artists sometimes use color pointedly. Jenny Heishman luridly invokes her Florida heritage while reflecting her immediate surroundings on Bainbridge Island—she's made sculptures in the shape of logs still wearing their dark bark, but with rainbow candy centers. A new public work she installed this month in South Lake Union involves a trompe l'oeil metal blanket in a Fort Lauderdale shade of blue, but it's also the blue of a common Northwest sight: the yard-work tarp. For Klara Glosova, Seth Damm, Julie Alpert, and Nicholas Nyland, color invokes lightness of spirit, theatricality, gamesmanship, and a rococo flavor shared by the elder colorist Jeffry Mitchell. Someone like Allyce Wood labors on the flip side, equally pointedly: Her drawings of teeming, overgrown plant life are in black and white. They have been drained of their blood. They are in second lives that are almost vampiric.
To people painting your houses: I beg you to consider color that is neither dutiful nor respectable (read: likely to appear on a Lexus gliding silently by), yet not reactionary, either. My request extends to public and private developers. The leading proposal for the big new Sodo arena involves an oval roof made of giant overlapping slats, like the blades on a jet engine's fan. Design documents say its skin will be "metal," and what appears in the computer graphics looks like a jet engine the color of a new penny. Maybe this is a reference to the color of a basketball, that dirty brown-orange. The whole thing reeks of rust. I am not enthused.
Please, designers: Consider the poor citizens of Seattle. What color we have is either sleep-inducing or methamphetaminic. Give us some substance. 
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Recently I stayed in a room near the top of the Red Lion on 5th. I was crestfallen at the view: cool monotones of non-committal color on generic structures. From this elevated perspective, the banality of the city's complexion was more nakedly revealed!
Of course, most other high-rise cities are shameless with similar 'nudity'. Boring beyond words. No doubt neutral-colored building materials are also the cheapest.
I was in Dubai recently and went up in the Burj Khalifa. The surrounding environment is monotone in its coloring, but the thousands of hi-rises make Manhattan look like a gopher hole. It's all in the style of the structures, ranging from sober to goofy. Color is neutral due to albedo considerations, but big money provides for some playful gooniness. There's a mega-sized Big Ben right next to generic glass boxes, etc. etc.
I wrote a big book on the architecture of Calcutta, India, and I never really talked about color because the city engages in it at every opportunity - it was self-apparent. The Victorian architect Halsey Ricardo (who designed the gigantic Howrah railway station opposite Calcutta, which was recently decked out in flashy but stately brick red and vibrant yellow) was a passionate advocate of color in architecture, even suggesting that park benches be livened up with any color other than black or grey. The mighty Howrah Bridge, connecting Calcutta with the rest of India, is silver by day, and lighted lavender by night.
It's a pity that, after its wild fling with the Central Library, Seattle reverted to the safe propriety of nothingness in its high-rises. Today it's all about shape rather than color: witness the Gherkin and the Shard in London, Gehry's Beekman Tower in NYC, etc.
Thanks Jen, for even bringing up the subject of color in built environments.
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Perhaps Garner would prefer the ubiquitous beige of the suburbs?
Seattlites may choose dark colors, but they absolutely are more creative with their color choices compared to most cities I've lived in. Seattle is the first place I ever saw houses painted in dark blue or black.
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And if you paint your house bright colors, take a little care; don't slop it on like you're Tom Sawyer whitewashing a fence. Seriously, I've seen hippie houses -- goddamn million-dollar hippie houses -- with paint sploshed all over the yard as well. Use some design nous. Hire a Mexican or a Dominican or something. Get a fucking clue.
You don't see that crap in San Francisco or the Netherlands. You see interesting and alive colors, artfully applied.
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Or Teal. Teal would be lovely. Right now, it's just sort of a brownish red. Nice enough, but not much pizazz.
as they say: "The color that sticks out gets painted beige"
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If Rolon Bert Garner wants to be "anti-northwest" he is welcome to hauls his stank ass to some other part of the country, we don't want him here.
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/rant.
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It was the funniest thing you ever saw, unless you had to live in it -- it drained all the color out of everyone who walked in, making it look like a roomful of corpses. And it was so dark you couldn't read a book by the light of a lamp.
This whole discussion has the whiff of "Seattle Chill" rants, but projected onto house color. It may be real, but it's probably blown out of proportion.
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We painted our previously dark blue home on a corner a bright historic yellow with warm white trim and complementary red and Swedish blue doors more than ten years ago. Pretty traditional in some parts of the country, and certainly not radical.
At first, cars would stop in the middle of the intersection while the drivers had a color conniption. Then, as the freshness of the paint toned down, we had a steady stream of people knocking on the door to ask what colors we used.
Having spoken to a few people at our front door over the years about house colors, I'm convinced that people find it hard to visualize something new and are intimidated by the length of time they have to live with their choice if it doesn't work out. As a result, they end up going for what they think is a "safe" option.
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I can't paint my house because it currently has aluminum siding, but at least I painted the window frames bright red. And I am sitting in a room right now with raspberry-colored walls.
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