- Blue Firth
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 13 hours ago
Colour Therapy At No.3 Aldfield
by Blue Firth, founder of Dohm Ceramics, 28th May 2025
In 2013 The Hayward Gallery held an exhibition called Light Show, a compendium of artists working with light. Light projected, light beamed, light you could bathe in. One work in particular has left an afterglow on the back of eyelids ever since, a series of interconnected rooms, each one lit in a pure hue of a different colour. This work by Carlos Cruz-Diez felt like some sort of domestic colour therapy – basking momentarily in a Hilma af Klint.
Living within paintings is something I have been thinking about a lot. My recent kitchen renovation started with layout and colour choices all stolen from the palette and composition of a painting called The Stiped Curtain by Scottish painter, Alberto Morroco. My attempt at bringing this mis-en-scene to life was a total disaster, as if the image was a rational and truthful representation of what could happen in a tiny terraced house with no south westerly daylight. How many hours of my life had I wasted matching Little Greene’s affogato paint to this perfect artwork?
I had saved other paintings of interiors to use as room inspiration: Morrocco, Vuillard and Bonnard, but this was now absurd. I was panicking that I would have to make decisions from scratch, and if I didn’t have some kind of starting point nothing would ever happen, and my partner would ban be from discussing paint swatches for life.
And why was I so obsessed with those particular images? Vivid moments captured in colour, views through doorways like portals into interior secrets where light sources and colours radiate with magic perfection? Surely I could capture something of this at home and get it right? I kept the Striped Curtain as a screen saver on my phone and went back to the drawing board for my tiny dark kitchen.
I knew of Mary Ramsden’s work for years and a trip to London saw me visiting a show of hers which promised tones of Virginia Woolfe and haunted interiors. The press release mentioned Vuillard and so right there and then Mary’s paintings now found themselves in my “saved for interiors” folder on the desktop.
Shape and colour looking like memories of furniture or textiles, a chair, a striped towel, a dressing gown all potential ciphers that I could use to help solve my own domestic decorating quandaries. I wasn’t “buying a painting to match a sofa” I wanted to exist IN the painting. Mary is a good friend and my indecision had got so bad that she was forced to leave me a 20 minute voice note with advice on painting my stairs. ‘Muga’ by The Paint and Paper library is what we landed on. I tried it. I didn’t like it.
Skip forward a couple of years and the kitchen is done, and the stairs still have 20 different paint swatch squares on them. Mary has moved back to Yorkshire and suggests visiting – there’s a cottage you can stay in she kindly says. We leg it up the A1 desperate to escape inner city Nottingham and patchwork stairs to arrive at the cottage. The exterior woodwork of which is painted the colour of a bullfinch’s breast. God damn that’s a good colour. With holiday glee we open the back door. The hall is colour-drenched in Muga. Why wasn’t it right on the stairs?
We enter the main rooms. Colour is radiating of every wall. Panelling is buzzing with an indescribable turquoise blue butted up against more of the glowing bullfinch red. Glass green stairs ascend behind a double-faced wood burner ( yes you heard, the most bacchanalian of log burners with two sides).
Out the window is the kind of view that feels like you’ve let your eyeballs run free – endless green fields and woodland. It was like the colour of the walls was propping up the building itself. Inflated with embers and watery blue. Bloody glorious. It feels like a frivolous aside to say furniture was sourced from John Cornall (another person saved on my desktop) and Fountains Abbey is a stone’s throw away (a 20 minute romp through a muddy field).
If the Cistercian monks came by for a cuppa they would undoubtably feel like they were having some kind of pigmented religious experience. If I had seen the colour swatches beforehand I would have thought it was a mad idea (what do I know!?). And yet in this drizzly dark December landscape I can’t imagine anywhere else I’d rather be. Each morning you yourself are colour-drenched, a definite mood lifter and it might have help me make a decision about the stairs.
Ps this was written a midwinter. We are now in spring 2025 and the stairs are being painted in a rather safe option of Reddish Brown.
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