World in Sepia

A black and white world doesn’t appeal to me with its tones of charcoal smoke smudges and grey blanket skies hanging depressively. Gradients are all well and good, but black has never been my colour, too final with a wreath of connotations. White is too innocent, cold and wintery. I’ve never liked the cold. And off-white is stale milk in a bottle, a turning into the rancid.

The natural medium for me is earthy sepia, seeping nostalgia, the glory days. Sepia oozes warmth, a hangover of summer as autumn slips in with palettes of promise, and like a dog with a bone I am hanging on to that. That’s my world in pictures.

Sepia celebrates beige expanses, cream walls of light to bounce off of, tanned wheat fields, woody concoctions in walnut, mahogany, beech and oak. It’s darker tone of brown is the colour of pecans, almonds and walnuts. Sepia speaks of warming chocolate, latte, mocha, a sprinkling of cinnamon on the lips, a taste of caramel, carob and cocoa, dark and velvety smooth. It is the colour of owls’ feathers, foxes' fur, the coats of dogs, thick and cuddly in copper and nut brown. It is gingerbread on my tongue, the comfort food warming and aromatic, sun-washed skin, fingers driven into earthy soil, and the safe colour of home.

I don’t need gregarious colours with pin spot reds and blues, just sepia in all its shades of driftwood and beach stones. It is a colour to fall into like running through fallen leaves. It is the colour of life.