Colour bombs: Shonibare, a big bird at Christmas... and more rainbows

 

Amid all the decidedly unfestive rain, puddles and grey unpleasantness that even the fairy lights and tinsel are struggling to enliven, I was delighted to come across some determinedly bright splashes of artistic colour over Christmas.

 

The first was on the lawn outside the Queen's House in Greenwich Park: a large painted metal work by Yinka Shonibare, appropriately named Wind Sculpture and seemingly made of yellow, green and orange Dutch-wax cloth that remained proudly unruffled by the strong gusts of rain-filled wind. A shaft of African sunshine in southeast London. (I'll be blogging about the Shonibare exhibition later.) 

The next day, Christmas Eve, I was walking across Trafalgar Square in the inevitable damp gloom when my eye was drawn - how could it fail to be - by the bright blue Hahn/Cock by Katharina Fritsch on the Fourth Plinth. I had seen pictures, and read the news stories about its unveiling by the Mayor of London with all the inevitable bad puns about Boris's cock, but my goodness I hadn't realised it was so HUGE. And so BLUE. Magnificent.

 

To round off the year with another blast of midwinter colour (it's hail today just for a change) here are the finished rainbow quilt commissions from my previous blog.

 I am indebted to  Mary Grace McNamara for the design of the boy's quilt, above, complete with instructions - I love the way the coloured squares seem to dance over the surface - and to my quilting friends who helped to supply fabrics for the girl's quilt, below: by using their pale colours in the middle (I don't usually do pale!) I realised they could give the illusion of sunlight shining through the rainbow.

 

Here's hoping for a light-filled, colourful and creative year ahead.