Beige

BEIGE
Colin and I have elected to live abroad for three months of the year, for inspiration.
The most exhilarating thing about packing for our first LIVING QUARTERS trip is selecting the art materials. This is partly because my clothing for the trip is not as glamorous as I’d like it to be.
I am quite a fashion-conscious gal, but I am allowed only one suitcase of clothes and shoes. Having decided on a wardrobe of mainly navy and cream, sand and khaki, with lots of shorts and jeans, a plentiful supply of socks and walking boots and being limited to only one pair of heels for the entire 2 months, I’ve got all the sartorial pleasure I can from the Lara Croft meets a Breton Sailor theme.
I wrote a last minute shopping list yesterday that included the phrase “BEIGE SOCKS”.
I realised Ii haven’t written these words together since I was 12, and at Brighton and Hove High School for Girls. Beige socks were part of the uniform, for arcane reasons socks could either be long and beige or short and white. Perhaps long and white was too racy. Shoes were never to be patent, in the belief that people could see our underwear if our shoes were too shiny. [Though how the nether regions of girls in thick, pleated, dark green skirts could be illuminated to a degree at which this would be physically possible remains a mystery that perhaps only A level Physics could have explained.]
Beige is a colour I love, because I love nearly all colours. The only down side to beige is the memories it conjures up of my old boss, a tough old toupee-wearing bully. He once announced:
”My wife’s got perfect taste. The decoration in our house is all baydge.”
On my first day of work at my first ever job in the textile industry, I hear his East End bark through the heavy teak door to his office:
“If you don’t deliver that thousand meters of print by tonight I’ll stuff it up your f***ing arse!”
The huge shock I had at the time seems very strange to me now, but then swear words were almost never used on T.V. [Notable exceptions being Kenneth Tynan and later the Sex Pistols]
Washing up my old mixing palettes is a messy but necessary ceremony that I try not to practice too often. As I scrub away, I remember colours mixed for specific designs or paintings and suddenly realise that I really don’t know what colours we will see on our travels.
I decide the most prudent option is to take one of each of all the gouaches I have. I now possess semi-clean palettes, ingrained as they are with the ghostly traces of Bengal Rose, Winsor Emerald and Purple Lake, like pre-war stage actors, unable to remove the final hints of greasepaint.
Art is a bit of a ritual, the final items needed for worship include: mixing brushes,[hog hair] painting brushes [fake and real sable but no ermine], pens and pencils [2B or not 2B], a scalpel and blades, glue, rubbers, rulers, pencil sharpeners, masking tape and sketchbooks of various sizes and paper qualities. We debate the merits and problems of charcoal: wonderfully forgiving as a medium, but so messy to travel with, ultimately we decide we’re high church, and, like incense, it’s a must have.