The design authorities have nominated “Mocha Mousse” as the color of the year, suggesting to me that either The Onion has taken over, or the members of The Color Board need to up their anti-depressants. A color of “subtle elegance and sensorial richness?” Think again: perhaps of global warming and how the coffee bean so many of us rely on for optimism is rapidly becoming extinct. Sorry! Mocha Mousse is about pillows! Beige linen against a gray couch, and wall paint that costs $95 per gallon. Neutrals and browns are hard, I get it. I’m sure it takes a full year to get the shades just right.
However. Looking forward to 2025, from a city often drenched in dispiriting shades of mud, I nominate the Color of the Year as Nostalgia. I just can’t, right now, look into the future. I need to rest in the soft duotones and bad color separations of childhood. Toys were tin, cotton had not yet been invaded by plastic, the inside of a sleeping bag was 100% flannel, smelling of Irish setters and woodsmoke. Who wouldn’t want to live there again?
Sometime in 2009 I had one of those spiritual crises that exceed one’s ability to handle alone. As a long-time student of Buddhism, I was dismayed to find that no amount of sutra practice or counting my breath from 1 to 10 could budge my mood. I prize anonymity in these situations, and so resolved to call on someone far away, whose picture I had seen in the Shamans for Hire Section of Tricycle Magazine. This woman’s portrait is probably still there, unchanged as it has been for decades. She’s the timeless European goddess, her arms gracefully folded over one knee, looking out at you between planks of long straight hair, with eyes radiating serenity and the hard-won wisdom that comes from dressing entirely in natural raw silk.
She said to me, over my crackling land line, Draw a map of Unhappiness and of Happiness, and I said I’d rather just do one. She said, When are you most happy? And I answered without a second’s hesitation, When I am carrying my camera.
For the next several months I took a photograph of Happiness every day and posted it on an ancient Typepad blog that has almost completely disappeared. My Happiness Project came at the same moment Gretchen Ruben wrote a book and started a franchise of the same name, but you must know I had never heard of her until months after I had started my own. It was in the zeitgeist. As the year turns towards its coldest months and reading the news can bring you to your knees, this short post about Happiness seems worthy of a second look.
Be Happy
Seattle has never seen weather like this. 100 degrees in the shocked garden, 95 in the studio, 91 in the kitchen. The heat melts all resistance. Complete strangers walk up to you and offer to buy you an ice cream cone. It is easy to keep walking until midnight, around and around the lake. Why eat dinner until the moon sets?
I find myself thinking of happiness, and of ice cream. Of Bobby McFerrin and the melodies of ease and satisfaction. This little ice cream vendor, with his arms now barely attached with fraying string, has been my companion for so many years I have lost count. In the immolating heat of the studio he has requested a portrait, and I have obliged. The pieces in this series are created with my own photography, drawing and assemblage, and reproduced as transfer prints from an Epson 2800 on rag paper. Each one is unique, and close up the surface resembles woodblock or letterpress. Finally, a good use for my favorite Circus Font. . .
I would like to point out that I am not against brown, or sepia, or beige in all its variations. There is a place for earth tones. The forest. Ancestors. Weather. As I reflect on the closing of the year and the years before the turn of the century, it is all about brown. To balance the global situation and the impending pressure to conform to the demands of avatars completely designed by artificial intelligence, I offer you a memory of The Portugal Toy Museum.
Somewhere on the 1990’s I visited Portugal with a dear friend. We had started our journey at a pink mansion in Sharpham, England, at a Buddhist retreat with Stephen Bachelor. (Color: Inner Peace Abalone) We flew from the sunless sheepscape of the British countryside to Lisbon, where we were dazzled by warmth and the shimmering magic of ceramic tile on every building. Dizzy with light, we adventured to Sintra, a fairytale village of castles and turrets and spiral roads where every vista seems familiar – and yes, in fact, the Ninth Gate was filmed here, and many others.
The high point however, was a visit to The Toy Museum. Here we lost ourselves in a history of play, beginning with the first Roman marble and ending with the last tin army. In between, a diorama I will never forget, of two boxers, whose gloves were made of walnut shells. I was beside myself with rapture, and in the middle of shooting the first 36 rolls of badly exposed analog film I ran down to the cafe to have an espresso. (Earth tones, again, Kodak Badblur Rawest Umber.) Five rolls of Kodak Gold 400, and I have no idea where these photographs are stored. This was before hard drives. Long before avatars. But every time I feel myself confronted by an insurmountable obstacle I think of these boxers.
My takeaway for the New Year? Think different. Give up your discontents. Lay down your usual weapons. Crack a walnut, and reconsider.
Happy New year!
Iskra
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