The way a smell can carry your senses away to a distant memory or a place you have never been, that’s the way colour works for me.
In a certain way, colour enters through your nose as well as your eyes, and through your skin, your heart, and your soul. Take, for example, the ripe, broken-hearted purple of a meadow of lupines, how it makes you feel something before you even acknowledge the plump blossoms climbing hand over hand to the sky. Colour is tied to emotion…indeed, colour may very well be the raiment of emotion. Love, passion, and anger would have nothing to wear were it not for fabulous, flexible red, in all her glory. The blue of someone’s eyes can invoke nostalgia, fury, jealousy; the rusted hue of a terra cotta pot can transport you to a winding Italian side street that you may have only dreamed of.
In the face of this extraordinary reality, I have become somewhat of a shepherd to color, or perhaps a composer, recognizing the sweet harmony or wickedly exciting contrast between colors and gathering them together to strike a magnificent chord. It is the palette for iota that I consider to be the pièce de résistance of each season. To see those colours quivering together on the page, newly acquainted, never before combined in such a way, fills my heart with joy. The patterns and designs are the vehicles of the colours, the concrete expression of a fleeting idea. (Colour, in a way, is like a butterfly, and can only be held for a moment before you must let it return to where it comes from).
I send these colors out into the world to awaken and inspire the hearts of others, to pull them out of the mosh-pit of colour that runs rampant and that seeks to overwhelm and dull our senses—there is such a thing as colour pollution! I hope that you have the opportunity to be touched by an iota, as it calls gently to you like an old friend writing to say hello.
I have created iota to be a wake up call to beauty, to fun, to being bold and taking a chance, and to remind you that this is can be a well designed world, if we allow ourselves a colourful life.