Last September I had the luxury of three precious days alone in Bologna – much of the time spent haunting the almost deserted rooms of the Museo Morandi. It is a sacred place and Morandi is a special favourite since school days. But beyond beauty, what struck me, as I sat gazing at a grid of some twenty or so of the artists’s smaller canvases, was how every little frame contained the makings of a perfectly harmonious interior colour scheme – to go. Purples, balanced by apricots and greens, all relaxing on top of softly neutral tones of warm grey and sophisticated beige. Morandi’s combinations seemed almost too perfect, ready to leap off the wall and into a modern Parisian drawing room perhaps.
Taking a colour scheme from a painting: At best, a ‘way of seeing’? At worst, unoriginal or, worse still, unimaginative? Who can say? But a year on, when I need to think colour and invoke those ‘effortless’ canvases in Bologna, I tend to think Giorgio and I might be onto something…