EMERALD GREEN

FINDING A WAY TO EMBRACE THE COLOR WAVE OF THE FUTURE

It's that time of year again when the wizards of color announce their new color of the year and even before I heard the new wearer of the sash I' felt a little nostalgic for tangerine orange. This year the lucky winner is emerald green. I'm a big fan of green but my greens tend to go to the extremes rather than the more mainstream centrist choices. I tend to cozy up to the more yellow greens like chartreuse or apple or jump over to the bluer side with teal. Embracing emerald is going to take some soul searching so I hit the Internet looking for emerald images I could get excited about.

I'm a sucker for distressed elegance and this room exemplifies that whole aesthetic by using a roomful of emerald green. The choice of leaving the crumbling walls and enhancing them with a painting technique that strengthens its flaws and turns the walls into art is genius. You don't have to hang a masterpiece on these walls; here emerald green is the focus. Coral comes here to help out with the seat cushions and then integrated into the carpet along with a softer shade of emerald. Nothing interferes with the green, not even the lighting. I'm usually very critical of proportion and scale but here by minimizing the sconces and the almost unnoticed pendant light these pieces don't appear lost, they sserve as a very strong supporting cast in a smash production.

I'm not sure if this is a composite picture, a photographer's studio set-up or an actual space but the emerald green of the couch and chair stand out brilliantly against the blue background. The lighting on the art and its placement are what throws me off in this photo. I can't tell if the painting is suspended from the ceiling, attached to the back wall or photoshoped into a composited image. Whatever the situation the result is still exquisite.

I'm not sure I could live with this myself but Miles Redd has designed kitchen completely swathed in emerald green that shimmers with haute taste. I'm trying to image how prepared food might look against such a lush green background, but I imagine it would appear very tasty.

For my taste emerald green works best when you put it up against some contrasting colors. The eclecticism and vibrancy of this room is something I could easily fall in love with. Adding the orange chair and the magenta wall decoration make the emerald wall sing.

Of course Mother Nature has already made emerald green her favorite color.

And then the Irish have taken the color and made it into the quintessential moniker for describing their homeland, the Emerald Isle.











THE GALLERY

Radioactive Cats, 1980
Sandy Skuglund, photographer
Represented by Telluride Gallery, Telluride, CO