From Orange To Dreamsicle

Color, while personal, is not private.

Orange is associated with creativity, joy, exploration, and sacral energy. It is centered in the lower belly, the womb of our creative ability to experience ourselves through connection and collaboration with other people and the rest of the world.

If green is the color of nature, orange is the color of dreams.

You can hate the color orange and yet look at a sunset and find it necessary among all the other colors to feel its harmony. You are not asking what makes the orange work with all the other colors. You are feeling how orange makes all the other sunset colors make sense.

How a Creamsicle becomes a Dreamsicle.

This revelation began at the onset of a dream. A Street of Dreams.

In most cities, there is a cluster of model homes featured by high-end builders with the latest products and local craftsmanship. In Portland, Oregon, it is an annual show called the Street of Dreams, which takes place at a top-of-the-hill, crème-de-la-crème neighborhood. The general public gets to tour the homes knowing few can afford them, but at least they can take home an image of what perfect would be if you could wrap it up and take it home.

Luckily, I got hooked up with a very well-known designer who, at that time, was a local celebrity and had a reputation for being a visionary. Everyone felt he knew where he was going with his vision, and I was going to follow him straight to the guest powder bath in his project at the Street of Dreams.

At the time, powder rooms were the room everyone felt safe painting a color, a little surprise for the guest to feel welcomed in a home. I was so ready for the challenge.

At the time, everyone was ripping their plaid and Waverly floral wallpaper patterns off their walls and replacing them with new faux-finishing paint glazes and techniques, which weren't new at all. Trompe l'oeil, French for "to deceive the eye," is an art that fools us into thinking we're looking at the real thing. In paintings, it adds perspective. In architecture, it was used to create illusions of infinite space.

I set out to master this skill.

I distilled and blended paint color harmonies from colors in my art and created glazes. I coordinated custom colors with them and practiced anything I could get my hands on.

I turned my walls into gigantic canvases.

My walls disappeared, and home became its own universe, with a sense of beauty and self-worth beyond what money could buy or trends could offer. Nothing needed to be excused or explained. Everything felt meaningful, with a sense of truth, connection, and harmony that hung in the air like an invisible presence. The edges where colors met, like the skies, had no boundaries.

Painting my walls became a symbolic and physical act of transformation. With every brushstroke, I felt myself glowing with self-worth and satisfaction, and it showed. There was a je ne sais quoi sense of abundance.

Everyone felt it.

Like in nature, when we embrace a full-color palette, light, shadows, and all, our lives expand with a sense of abundance that has no end in sight. Boundaries come from a place of connection rather than control. Contrast provides clarity, patterns reveal potential, and harmony comes with bliss. There isn't a color that can or can't come and go when you need it to help you grow through change.

When they asked for my help, I led them down the road I trailblazed for myself with the same painting ritual. I recreated sunset effects in different colors for their walls. Painting was my vehicle for making color experiments inside during the rainy winter months of the Northwest and what allowed me to recreate the warm Puerto Rican climate for my home with color relationships that transcended trends and circumstances.

I couldn't have expressed this light without having embraced the shadows it created.

My color work was going to be seen by everyone. Then came one of several turning points that took me from being a color consultant to being a color ecologist, someone who, for the last thirty years, has studied how humans interact with each other and with their physical environment through color.

Color is how Mother Nature makes us fall in love with life. We want to fall in love with our homes.

It's not hard to paint color. It's hard to paint what that color feels like.

Why do we want to feel color?

Give it up for Mother Nature and her force of nature to will us into falling in love with beauty and harmony through color before we even have time to think about it. There is no time. We have to arrive in this world, survive, and thrive by making connections and relationships. For those relationships to work, they have to function in harmony. For harmony to work, we have to need it. For us to need it, we have to feel it.

Need it and feel it, we do.

Like humans, harmony can't exist in isolation. There are no bad colors, only bad color relationships. How colors reflect together in an environment is the difference between seeing color and feeling its energy.

I had mixed rich greens and burnt terracotta shades to make the walls look like they had aged to a green perfection. This was a perfect color relationship, or so I thought, with the orange terracotta tiles in the bathroom and the greens woven throughout the orange, burnt red, and sage green fabrics in the living room. Gloriously soft with the golden bamboo floors.

He hated my color reflections.

At first, he found them to be “too bright,” and I quickly realized that a bit more muted would bring the walls back a bit. Better? No. He wanted them way back, all the way back to the grout.

I kept muting them until I realized he wanted them neutral, as in the color of the grout. He wanted the shades of the wall to be in the grout color. A light battleship gray.

That bathroom tile was an organic orange with a green patina. Battleship gray is not what I think of when I look at a sunset, terracotta pots in an Italian garden, or the trim on an adobe home in Santa Fe.

He had a color in mind.

I had sunsets to think about.

I remember walking out the door, looking at a beautiful view of the sunset, and thinking I can’t climb a mountain top that leads to someone else’s view. In that moment, not a minute sooner, I ran into another designer on the street who needed a laundry room painted.

I took it instead.

This is what the Street of Dreams taught me about knowing. Painting is a creative, sensorial experience, not a visual one, and color has to be felt, not forced.

Coloring is an act of belonging.

You are the palette.

 Send this to someone you know. 

Gretchen.

See my color work at colorbaggage.com