Summer Rain

It's raining here which is wonderful and unexpected (to me). It smells delicious out there and all my thirsty starved rhodies are feeling the love. Max does not agree to coloring in coloring books very often, but when he agrees, I always color in this coloring book that my friend Sharon gave to me to give to my little friend Sophie. I never gave it to Sophie because it is the best coloring book I've ever had. The illustrations are wonderful and the pattern mixing on the kimonos and interesting "western" outfits is exactly what I have always loved to do myself.

It occurred to me while coloring this morning that I might be best off choosing a color palette from the pictures I've already done. The ones I've colored can also be framed as a little eye treat in my studio. I have some Michael Miller fabric of little Chinese girls which would go well with an Asian theme. Although any traditional Chinese or Japanese people would be horrified to be paired together eternally in my studio.

I don't actually normally have a big appetite for Asian culture or food. I like Chinese food well enough, but Japanese food includes an awful lot of sea weed and fish, both of which make me hurl. The choices that don't include these things is tempura (which I love) but which doesn't agree with my stomach. I happen to really love Asian people and my favorite place to hang out when I lived in San Francisco was China Town, but even so, Chinese art, Chinese decorating and traditions aren't super high on my list of inspirations.

Though, while I'm writing this I'm realizing that that it isn't entirely true. Perhaps I should say that Japanese culture doesn't hold special appeal to me because I am a brash, outspoken, uncouth, person immune to the niceties of gentle company and manners. Japanese culture seems to revolve around reticence, delicate beauty, exquisite manners and an appreciation for the single object of beauty. I am the opposite of all these things. The simple, the single, the delicate is for more subtle people than me. If one orchid is gorgeous in a little vase, I generally want to see a huge vase exploding with them. I like bold splashes of color, exuberant floral displays, and when it comes to manners, I think of myself as being a fairly polite person but very forthright and not a single drop of reticence.

In Japanese culture I would be unwelcome off-note.

But what occurs to me now is that when it comes to Chinese people, I feel more at home. They also observe more social rules than your average American of western heritage, but there is no holding back in Chinese decorating, in Chinese fashion, or speaking their minds. One of my favorite people on this planet is my close friend named Cam who is Chinese American and what I love about her is her honesty, her humor, her work ethic (incredible), and her ability to answer this question:

"So, all the older Chinese women I've ever met look like they just yanked things out of their closets with a blindfold on and smell like mothballs...is it my imagination that this is a cultural phenomenon?"

...without getting the slightest bit offended. There is no way I could fail to love a person who can answer such candid questions about her cultural back ground with the same degree of honesty in which the question was asked. And she gives as good as she gets. She's a firecracker and a brilliant designer.

We were design assistants at Mulberry Neckwear together. There was a designer we worked with named Xiaoye who I also loved a great deal who came from Beijing. I started learning some Chinese words and felt most at home working with Cam and Xiaoye because neither of them played office politics and worked their asses off as a team to get things done without bad attitudes as some of our other coworkers had.

Anyway, this all reminds me that I do find myself connecting with Asian culture I just don't necessarily connect with it visually. Still, I find I want to look at the pictures I've colored in this coloring book all the time. The paint chips in the first picture represent the colors I had settled on for my studio. The orange color was going to be the walls, the pink color was going to be the floor, the green was going to be an accent color used in the closet and picked up in a few other places like the curtains.

But now I'm unsure again. Now I want to use turquoise with that cool green and have pink accents as shown in the second picture. As you can see, I'm not doing subtle. How to choose though? I usually don't have a problem knowing what I want. But when it comes to color I find myself constantly undecided because there are a million different possibilities to be explored and I have such a hunger to surround myself with color, it's a lot like going to the grocery store on an empty stomach.

Today I work on emptying the studio out. Now that Future Girl has mentioned keeping the desk I am rethinking it. Mostly because I'm not sure what's behind it and if the paneling doesn't go all the way behind the desk then I will be faced with either matching the paneling before painting or ripping the rest of the paneling off which sounds really hard and unpleasant. However, I have planned on using my old Deco dining room furniture in there and there probably won't be room if I leave the desk.