Orange

I’ve been thinking about orange a lot lately. I have a hankering to paint my bedroom in my new condo orange, and I’m not entirely sure where the urge comes from. Wanting to splash my new space with a signal of energy, I guess, warm passion and intention to DO something. Orange is extroverted, I think, and impulsive.

I was talking about paint colours with my online group earlier this week, then I went into the coffee shop near my place, all cranky. I had something with a deadline I had to cram into about 2 hours that really needed about 5. I hied myself off to Balzac’s to try to focus, and got very very pissy when it was overrun with tourists who wanted my favourite table, didn’t know what to order. I marched upstairs rather sulkily, liking the space but knowing that I found the chairs the wrong height for ergonomic work.

And wandered into an art show that immediately pulled me out of myself. Work by this woman, Julia Grady. Grabbed, I looked closely at the different pieces, finding myself rolling into some of them — then came across this amazing piece about BC. That had a little orange volkswagen camper van in it.

I spent a chunk of my childhood in an orange VW camper van, rolling across Europe, sleeping in the poptop bit. Sitting in the front seat in Scotland, imagining that to the outside world maybe I would be mistaken for an adult. (I was 7). Listening to my mother read letters from home out loud, a snippet from my grandparents about the Munich Olympics and how awful it was that it had happened while we were there. Scandinavia and fiords. Vomiting in a campground somewhere in Norway. Waking up in the night and realizing I’d wet my bed somewhere in Denmark because I was afraid to go to the washroom by myself, and sleeping in the sog for days because I was ashamed to admit it. My uncle Mike fleeing the attached tent in his yellow jammies when we camped on a wasps’ nest one night. Lying awake one night and reading short stories from one of my dad’s high school texts, dark, early 70s stories about urban stabbings and predatory drifters. Being carsick in a traffic jam in Madrid, all tangled in my brain with a bullfight, the bull drooling fluids before it collapsed. My father’s games of chicken with the Eastern Bloc, seeing what would happen if we approached the Czech border, the edge of the USSR in Finland. My parents’ marriage disintegrating over the kilometres traveled, windshield wipers snapping in time to their tense bickering.

We brought the van back to Canada with us, and it became my father’s car for years, stuffed with kids for his annual christmas party, the border between home with my mother and visits with my father. Divorced Dad type outings, to Niagara Falls, Fort Malden, Bob-lo.

This is the piece I bought on Friday.

I often feel grabbed by a piece of art, feeling kinship — but I’ve never had the experience of parallel/alternative universes like this. The artist’s particular narrative associated with this work is completely different from mine, of course, her camper van the space of some completely other lived experience. But the magic of this impression of an encounter with BC, van trailed across a country, warm encaustic — a moment of intense connection, assertion of exploration and possibility.

An orange bedroom seems right.

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