A Luminous Halo

"Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end." --Virginia Woolf

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Location: Springfield, Massachusetts, United States

Smith ’69, Purdue ’75. Anarchist; agnostic. Writer. Steward of the Pascal Emory house, an 1871 Second-Empire Victorian; of Sylvie, a 1974 Mercedes-Benz 450SL; and of Taz, a purebred Cockador who sets the standard for her breed. Happy enough for the present in Massachusetts, but always looking East.

Thursday, February 07, 2008

Alien Green

My first step in transforming my kitchen from a cavernous and beautiful, but overly white, space was to paint a portion of it a color called "alien green." This acid yellow-green is a color pulled out of the wall of stained glass: one of the wildest colors. So I decided to paint a rather small area with it, somewhat of an accent, figuring if I didn't like it, I could pretty easily just paint over it.

In fact, I like it very much. The green is nothing more than three strips, 6 3/4" wide, that run up close to twenty feet, from the floor of the kitchen to the ceiling of the loft, and along the top of the loft. They're actually the edges of a bearing wall which was cut out of the side of the house in the 80s. A two-story porch was enclosed at that time, expanding the back wing (formerly a warren of rooms with a couple of bedrooms above) into a huge kitchen and loft.

This green edge defines the break between the ten-foot-high area of the kitchen and the cathedral-ceilinged side. I can't wait to get rid of the rest of the boring chalky-white walls; unfortunately, I'm going to need a scaffolding to get to most of it. For now, my alien green stripes are a baby step in that direction.

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