With a Painter’s Eye: Place-Based Colour Design for Architecture
Sunday Morning Colour Talk with Sonia van de Haar (Lymesmith)
*Update: recording at the end of the post
On Sunday, May 26, our guest is Sonia van de Haar, an Australian artist and architectural colour designer. Her studio, Lymesmith, reflects her cross-disciplinary interests, and position outside of traditional gallery-based art making. Sonia will talk about her practice in colour design and site specific artworks for the built environment.
There will be time for Q&A at the end. Jeannette Hanenburg, Inez Michiels and Maja Kaurin /
are inviting you to join the discussion, along with other colour lovers from all around the world!Places are limited to 100, so ensure your virtual seat by registering early.
With a Painter’s Eye: Place-Based Colour Design for Architecture
A case for colour complexity and meaning in the built environment
A hybrid practice operating between art and architecture, Lymesmith is first and foremost about painting and colour within, for, and in response to, buildings.
The paintings I make are mostly large-scale works (murals) for buildings, or they are literally painted and decorated buildings – colour designs and interventions for building interiors and exteriors. It’s still a painting practice, but it’s a painting practice expanded into the built environment, and away from the gallery.
-Sonia van de Haar
There are three distinct but overlapping aspects of Sonia van de Haar's practice: colour design for the built environment, site specific artworks for the built environment, and painting. All three aspects coexist and nourish each other. Research and advocacy for the intelligent and human centred use of colour in the built environment is part of this work.
Lymesmith employs colour to enhance connection to place, to amplify or camouflage built form, to signify cultural and historical connections, to reinforce way-finding strategies, to create new identities and regenerate places in transition.
The name Lymesmith was coined to describe one who works with lime (a key ingredient in both fresco painting and cement), and whose practice makes essential connections across the disciplines of architecture, painting and building. Developing a greater awareness of how colour and materiality relate to place is an ongoing theme and project.
ABOUT
Sonia van de Haar / Lymesmith is an artist and architectural colour specialist. She formed Lymesmith in 2011 as a colour focussed studio working to produce site specific artworks and material palettes for the built environment. Born in Australia, she studied painting at the School of Art and Design, Australian National University and fresco painting at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India, where her journey towards an integrated art and architecture practice began. Shesubsequently completed an architecture degree at the University of New South Wales. Her studio, Lymesmith, reflects her cross-disciplinary interests, and position outside of traditional gallery-based art making. In both her architectural and art work, Sonia is known as Lymesmith.
Here is the recording of the event:
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