Have Irish kids lost the art of painting?

IT was 1980s TV star, Bosco, who first said it.

Actually, he sang it. “Look at me, oh, look at me, I’m painting”. It was one of Bosco’s leitmotifs — the deeply personal song. In fact, he made an album in 1983, called Bosco Sings: This is Where I Live. Like a lot of albums, it was quite political. Bosco was referencing the Northern Ireland situation in the trio of songs on side A: ‘Where do you live?; ‘I am a Bandsman’ and ‘Double Bubble Trouble’.

But on side B was ‘I’m Painting’ and its lyrics resonated with me. “It’s just the kind of thing to do/when you really have the blues.” During childhood summers as bad as this one, watching the grand stretch in the evenings refracted through the raindrops on the window-pane, you were ordered to go and paint something.

But, after a while, most of us stopped painting. Unfortunately, along with writing stories, it’s a childhood pursuit that gets dropped because of a perceived lack of talent. It’s a pity. There’s nothing like the colour of paint. It’s the deepest colour you’ll see, undiluted by pixels or threads.

For those of us who no longer paint with small brushes, there’s always painting the house. And when buying paint, you can explore the ever-expanding range of colours you didn’t know existed. I’ve just come from the paint place, Farrow & Ball, armed with their colour catalogue.

It starts off with ‘all-white’. That sounds a little Deep South, but it’s simple enough. Quickly, though, it starts to go off-piste. In fact, I’m surprised there isn’t a colour called ‘off-piste.’ Because there seems to be a colour for every other situation. ‘Savage ground’, in Ireland, means a good sports arena. For Farrow and Ball, ‘savage ground’ “has the strength of string with none of the underlying green” (‘string’ is the colour of untreated gardener’s twine.)

It’s a long way from ‘magnolia’. And that’s even before you get to the breath — ‘elephant’s breath’, to be precise. I’m sure I’m not the only one who hasn’t gone to the zoo, seen an elephant respire and thought: “if only I could capture that for our kitchen units. It would go so well with the ‘smoked trout’ architrave.” Because ‘smoked trout’ is also a colour. Best not to use too much of it in the kitchen, though. When preparing an actual smoked trout, if you turned your back you might lose it. And it is on the matter of fish that, I think, Farrow and Ball colours finally jumped the shark. One colour that I would describe as ‘mushroomy-brown’ (which probably explains why my CV never made it past F&B’s screening stage) is called ‘dead salmon’. I don’t object to the aptness, just to what it might do to dinner party conversation. Because if you are buying Farrow and Ball paint, you will be having dinner parties. And when the conversation has moved on from immigration, someone is going to say: “I love the ‘cabbage white’ on the doors, but what is that on the skirting boards?”

“‘Dead Salmon’,” you’ll say. And then a pall will be cast over the proceedings. Someone will think they get a faint smell of fish. I don’t sneer at these colours. They’ve just as much a right to exist as ‘sort-of reddy’. All colour is meaningless, because it’s just the way light reflects off an object and is received in the cones in the backs of our eyes. My ‘rectory red’ could be your ‘Hague blue’. Who’s to say which is the true colour? If that thought disturbs you, why don’t we retire to the drawing room, which is done out in relaxing ‘churlish green’, and listen to some Bosco.