Many visitors to the exhibition found resonances with this beautiful piece of writing by my mother. A number of people have asked for a copy of it, so here it is…

Grey is the colour of promise

It is the colour of morning mist which evaporates to a wonderful day: the dark grey of night’s reluctance; the tentative flowerings of dawn’s light; the opalescence of sunrise; and then the day.

It is the colour of pebbles until a myriad of others erupt in them with the coming of water. The colour of rock until the sun releases crystals, fissures, the outline of lived things and a history of long ago.

It is the colour of clouds until they unburden themselves of the living water they bear.

Grey is the colour of concrete – lumpen or menacing – but which imagination can enrich into enabling or even beautiful things.

Grey has become the colour of old age, but why? It can be a time of freedom from other responsibilities, when the enforced rest can be used to re-discover the self that was, before the body slowed down. Not just the exuberant rebellion of purple coat, red hat, green shoes but an examination of what went on, what was suppressed, what might be retrieved and what can be built on lively experience.

copyright Margaret Aldington, 2016

The image at the top of this blog is the grey I mixed to paint the inside of the matryoshka dolls series in the exhibition.