106 - Style Power

106 - Style Power
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

I just love strong colours, and the use of high contrast to filter out unwanted data. Some people love to fill their homes with bits and pieces, swaths of material and intricately moulded furniture, often to make their surroundings 'homey' or 'comfortable', or even 'traditional'.

Let's take each of these in turn:

Homey. Does surrounding oneself with an excess of blurred print, line and carving make a place more like home? Is this like the fluff on the inside of a nest? Or, is this an image of a country life idealized in books? I do not mind people finding homey in these surroundings, I object to the snooty way they put down any other kind of homey. When I look around the world I see homey in all kinds of situations, many of them having no relation to a North European chintz dream. Our flat is quite minimal, we feel fully relaxed and at home - and the issue of having high-maintenance flounces and carvings does not exist. We rarely have to iron, and as a result we can find the repose in reading a book that others find working over the ironing board. Homey for me is my wife dozing off in the evening under a blanket and a cat on our reclining sofa in front of the television with a book beside her.

Comfortable. Comfort something solely detected by the skin, or do the eyes and ears also play a part. Perhaps we can define homey as comfort for the eye, and assume we are going to be considering the skin here? How many square yards or metres of padded surface do I and my family and friends need? A larger sofa might make our room more crowded or push us to buying a larger property, neither of which appeals as crowded is less homey and more space means more money and time invested in something we do not really need. Comfortable should not interfere with homey, they must compromise somewhere.

Traditional. If we all organized a huge baby swop with other couples around the world for each new-born child, one would find that, for example, a Polish-born baby brought up in the Amazon region would have no Polish but all Amazonian ideals - whatever they might be. Traditional is our local take on what is possible, largely absorbed as children. In terms of homey and comfortable in the home, traditional is impossible to achieve because the society and technology have changed - we can only seek to replicate a part, often only on a visual level. We have to make a choice between the potentially worn antique and the new replica, neither of which are 'true' as in being the actual conditions that occurred, say, 150 years ago Since tradition is a replica of the random place our family lived in when we were born, what locks us into continuing it?

Anyway this image has no chintz, it has no sop for a tradition that requires the total image area to include whatever information was present on the scene. This is an image intended to allow you mind to fill in the missing chintz - your chintz, not my chintz or the chintz of that person who lives on the other side of town or just across the road or around the other side of the planet. Your chintz.