About Beans, Magic and Orleans
Week 36's colours are Warm Pink, Light Fuchsia, Lilac & Deep Purple
This week’s #coloricombo comes to you from Orleans in the Loire Valley, France.
It’s a slightly disjointed one as my curious wandering mind got distracted by information about the region and travel brochures highlighting local attractions and I still wanted to share my coloured bean discovery with you.
Why Orleans? I am here because we’re en route to the Dordogne region in southwest France, where I’ll be teaching on a retreat.
Orleans is where we ended the first leg of our journey, after a trip under the Channel on the LeShuttle car transporter. It’s a pretty city with lots of greenery and trees, and a very long history dating back to the Carnutes and the Romans and famous for its link to the military leader Joan of Arc.
I could’ve featured an artwork from the impressive Musée Des Beaux Arts but being Monday it’s closed today, so instead I am sharing some gorgeous colours I found back home.
We plan to be in France for a while, so before we left home in England, I raided our vegetable patch one last time. It contains some common old garden vegetable varieties like tomatoes and zucchini plants, and this year we also planted beans and tender stem broccoli (which the neighbourhood rabbits unfortunately devoured).
Our purple French bean plants grew high and strong and turned out to be very prolific croppers, whilst the scarlet runner beans took a while to get going. I harvested them for the first time last week, and much to my surprise I found these gorgeous pink and blue speckled beans popping out of their green pods when I shelled them. Totally unexpected, they looked like painted beads and had to be the inspiration for this week’s #coloricombo colours.
So where does the magic come in? Ever heard of Houdini? Of course you have, the famous magician and escapologist Harry Houdini (real name Erik Weisz). Well before that Houdini where was Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin. French watchmaker, illusionist and magician credited as the first modern conjurer. I learned of him from those local travel brochures as he was born not far from Orleans, in a place called Blois.
Houdin was an incredible magician and the story of how he was employed by Napoleon III to impress the Marabouts of Algiers is the stuff of fiction, harnessing electricity and catching bullets in his teeth to maintain the loyalty of the local tribes to France.
How did I get here? Beans, magic and Orleans? Well, Houndin’s repertoire of tricks once included an illusion with coffee beans!
The story of this magician is is fascinating, have a listen to this podcast (Spotify link) from Stuff You Missed in History Class to find out more.
"Scarlet runner beans”
Colour Combination
The colours this week are Warm Pink, Light Fuchsia, Lilac & Deep Purple. Use the colours along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour if you wish. Create an artwork in any medium or style.
I love seeing what you create. If you’re posting on Instagram, please tag #coloricombo and #estemacleod and join us in the private Facebook group Creative Prompts.
Explore Abstracts I
I case you missed it, Explore Abstracts I is back by popular demand and is running for the final time from 6 October to 16 November. There’s an Early Bird discount available until 13 September, find out all the details here.
I’ll now think of them as Este’s beans instead of Scarlet runners. The colors are magical, and I can imagine the joy of cracking open a pod and finding jewels such as these. So many simple joys and the high acts of sourcery are gifted to us daily courtesy of Nature, of course artists are magicians of sorts—it’s just difficult to create anything that hasn’t already been created or inspired by Nature. Yet there is feeling, connection, memory…intangible and abstract ways of imaging and imagining what a bean might be and where these colours might go. I’ll run with beans this week! Thank you Este.
Beautiful beans! I have a vegetable garden also but have yet to try growing beans! New inspiration!