Absorb a moment of happiness with ORANGE!



Photo and Painting by Dita



 A friend came back from a trip to Door Country with such beautiful pictures of ‘Fall’...a time when all the leaves turn into flowers... And then in one of the pictures, like magic, the colour on the leaves seemed to have escaped to colour the sky behind them....the Sun was setting in the horizon shrouding the trees with eternal mystery...and the darkness was slowly engulfing the branches one steady step at a time...that’s what I tried to capture in this painting of mine...

What colour do you see when you close your eyes to absorb a moment of happiness? I see Orange! The cheerful, stimulating and charming ORANGE! The colour that has this undefined warmth without being aggressive...the colour that is exciting and engaging...the colour that stimulates the fire within you and encourages you to reach the heights without pushing you over the edge! Orange to me relates to the warm fuzzy feeling within me...whether it is what I feel when I&J give me their tightest hug ever or when M makes me a cup of tea on a lazy Sunday morning or when Ma sends me a message saying “Proud of you Buru”!

Even nature associates the colour Orange with wholesomeness and desirability. Different nourishing and delicious foods are orange, like squashes, pumpkin, carrots, sweet potatoes and citrus fruits.  In fact, in the English language, the word ‘orange’ dates to the introduction of the fruit which gave the colour its name. Before then, the colour had been known as ‘geoluhread’, or yellow-red!

Photo Courtsey: dimensionsinfo.com

Orange or more specifically Deep Saffron is the most used colour in Hinduism historically and culturally. It is the most commonly worn colour for religious ceremonies and has been so for more than 2000 yrs. The colour signifies courage, sacrifice and the spirit of renunciation and was therefore my obvious choice for the background of the painting below. I will talk all about this favourite patchwork painting of mine in another post because like all other paintings of mine, this one also has a story which is very close to my heart!


Painting and Photo by Dita