COLOUR’S INFLUENCE

Taranaki Daily News, 13 October 1934, Page 14 (Supplement)

COLOUR’S INFLUENCE

PEOPLE’S BRIGHTER HOMES. “PUREST JiIINDS LOVE IT MOST.” Ruskin somewhere in “The Stones of Venice” says that “the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour most.” One of the outstanding complaints against the industrial civilisation of the nineteenth century was that it plagued the world with squalid tenement houses, dingy workshops, drab clothes and ugly machine-made articles of every-day use. Largely, too, the charge holds good of our own age as well, writes Alexander Bakshy in Current History. In industrial communities the homes and surroundings of tthe greater numbers of population are still distressingly dreary and ugly. Yet in one respect there has been a striking change. In a thousand ways our life has been invaded by prismatic colour in all the endless variety of its shades and combinations. Conspicuous mainly in the life of the more prosperous, it has nevertheless also filtered into the humbler homes through the gayly tinted articles of mass consumption. Even the streets and houses of our cities have taken on a gayer aspect • because of the more plentiful use of colour and exteriors. ALL DUE TO THE CHEMISTS. One might almost imagine that after a century of complacent resignation to his drab’ surroundings the average citizen suddenly grew conscious of their ugliness and began to paint them in all the hues of the rainbow. The surprising fact is that the average citizen himself never took any serious steps to regain the beauty of colour. He never shouted: “I am sick and tired of these dull and dirty tints. I must have colour that is jolly.” Yet chromatic colour did come into his life because chemists and electricians discovered the means of producing colour in large quantities and cheaply, and because the manufacturers of many articles found in colour a new allurement for buyers. • Now that this preference which lay dormant so long has been awakened and we are becoming increasingly colourconscious, does it mean that some sort of radical change is to be expected in our general attitude toward life? It has been said that colour stands for emotionalism, form for intellectualism. The emotional East wallows in colour. The intellectual West worships form. Are we then heading for a civilisation ruled by emotion rather than intellect? Or is it “the pure and most thoughtful minds” that love colour most?