Article originally posted in Penobscot Bay Pilot's spring issue of The Wave, 2015
Walls of palette possibilities, and how to choose
Patty Berke and an artist’s eye
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| Patty Berke shows off the custom color panels for North Atlantic Painting’s new showroom. (Photo by Lynda Clancy) |
“A lot of people are stuck with the idea of linen white, but you have to start getting them intrigued with other colors.”
That’s
Patty Berke, an artist and house painter, who gets a kick out of
helping people choose what colors to paint their walls. She spends her
waking hours (and no doubt her sleeping ones) thinking about the dance
of colors, how they blend and create spatial dimensions, how they soothe
and invigorate, and how people respond individually to different hues.
“Color
is a very critical thing,” said artist John Hench, who spent 65 years
with the Walt Disney company creating movie sets and theme parks. “I've
found that architects don't like colors. Engineers, too. And so somebody
has to stand in. Because this is the finish of it. It is the emotional
part of a structure.”
Think that color schemes are secondary to the wellbeing of a home? Think again.
Artist Pablo Picasso said: “Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no.” But they do.
The
challenge is to find the right combinations of colors so that when you
paint your walls, your heart and mind sing, as well. The web is full of
advice about the psychology of paint, and what colors to use in
different rooms, from the kitchen to bath to bedroom. One suggestion is
to paint your kitchen the color of the kitchen where you spent your
childhood years. Really? Avocado green, anyone?
But there is merit to the psychology of paint; hospitals are painting rooms now to promote healing.
“Everyone thinks color is going the shrink the room,” said Patty. “But it doesn’t. Color can accent a room, make it pop.”
She
is particularly drawn to the color gray. To the uninitiated, that
doesn’t mean the color gray as we conventionally regard it — the grey of
the harbor, fog, November clouds. To Patty, the color gray is expansive
and loaded with opportunity.
“Anything on top of gray will pop,”
she said. “You can have soft, oaky grays, and then paint a wall a jewel
blue, and it’s beautiful.”
Gray is considered by some interior
designers as the replacement of beige, creates a dignified space and is
associated with intellect and refinement.
Patty and her husband,
Peter, own and operate the Rockport-based North Atlantic Painting
Company, whose teams do everything from removing old wall paper and
skim-coating walls to fine interior painting. The company also has a
shop where furniture, doors, siding and windows can be spray-painted or
refinished.
“If a customer picks a paint color, 90 percent of the
time we can tell what it’s going to look like,” said Peter. “How it
will highlight or accent lighting, art work, draperies, rugs and
texture.”
Experience is telling them to build a different type of
color library so that clients can truly get an idea of how a color might
work in their living room, kitchen, office, studio or business.
Traditionally,
the painter hauls around a satchel of paint chips — thousands of paper
color samples hanging together on a ring, a Rolodex of color. Or, a
homeowner will stand in front of walls of paint chips at the local
hardware store, stretching their imaginations about what might look good
on a given wall.
But Peter and Patty are trying a different
approach. They are building a library of sample boards, each measuring
11” x 17”, which illustrate much more effectively how a wall or room
might look under different colors. The boards are big enough to provide a
better sense of what could be.
“People see different types of
colors, and with all the colors at a paint store, it gets overwhelming,”
Peter said. Patty is painting the sample boards and displaying them at
the company’s Route 90 shop. As time goes on, the library, with its
tactile approach to paint, will build to include hundreds of samples.
“People
are using more and more colors,” Peter said. “Even art galleries are
now painted in rich, dark colors. That works to highlight the artwork.”
As
for painting itself, Patty is in her element as soon as she steps into a
room and gets to work. “I love painting, going into my own space,” she
said. “When you are done, you turn around and see something. Even
before, when a room is sanded, primed and caulked, there is a feeling of
accomplishment.”
And then there is the ever-changing landscape
of customers — “a whole new set of people and their paint challenges,”
said Peter. “We love it, and a lot of our clients are now our very good
friends.”
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