It’s not about Gordon. He is beyond our help anyway, even if we cared. No, something even stranger is afoot.
Somewhere in Portugal they are having a festival– (not surprising in itself, of course, somewhere in Portugal they are ALWAYS having a festival)– dedicated to the colour brown.
There will be a performance by chocolate puppets. Poems will be read, and videos, photographs and paintings displayed. There will be music, and food, and all this in defence of the colour brown.
You might think there is enough brown in the world already and that brown can look after itself, but this is not good enough for the organisers of this event. They call brown ‘the under-rated colour’.
Brown is not part of the rainbow. It is not in the colour wheel taught to schoolchildren in art lessons, it was not featured in the famous optical experiments of Sir Isaac Newton. Brown has never been ‘the new black’. Brown is neglected, then, it holds a tenuous, lowly place among the colours, a muddy mixture of a thing, related to unseemly bodily functions and neither smart nor fashionable.
But these lovers of brown are determined to change such perceptions. They declare shamelessly that brown is the origin of life, since grain is grown in the brown earth and baked into brown loaves, that brown is the sustainer, being the colour of wood, of the trunks of trees, that brown is the terminus, (the colour of rust), the destination, (the colour of earth), the desire, (the colour of chocolate) the ambition; brown is the colour we aspire to, lying in the sun.
They are holding this festival in Perre, near Viana do Castelo in the north of Portugal, a beautiful region less disturbed by tourism than the south. It happened on the 19th and 20th of September, and artists and performers from Portugal, Holland, England, Turkey, Russia and Brazil were featured. Photographers from all over the world have contributed brown images. Perhaps after this we will look at brown with new respect. Perhaps brown will take on a new glow.
But anyway, it’s a good excuse for a party. And isn’t whiskey brown?