Grey Takes Over

Our weather included only grey days for over a week. My eyes ached to see color. It made me think of workers in cubicles who may drive home in the grey day or the dark. Think of what they would feel if they walked into their abodes and found the walls painted grey. It would be very depressing to be surrounded by nothing but grey. Color is essential for our well-being as I point out in this blog.
Thank goodness that if there are 50 shades of grey, that there are millions of shades and tints of colors.

In San Francisco, grey was lavishly painted over doors and murals created by staff and students and the results are a perfect example of what I stated earlier. Click on the purple link in the article below to see the "before" and "after" pictures. The latter reek of institutionalism and the students must feel as if they are in prison.  bbl

It's a good thing that fire marshals weren't around to critique Michelangelo's work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel!

Over at Lawton School in San Francisco, first-graders had painted a series of merry and colorful murals on classroom doors. This work was related to science subjects they'd been studying: biology, the ecology and weather.
But about a month ago, a fire marshal came through and declared that the paintings violated safety codes, because they made the doors hard to see during a fire. The marshal told the teachers to paint over the murals. Teacher Debra Netkin tried to comply, but save the murals. "I put the words 'Door' and 'Exit' on my door," she e-mails, "thought it would make them happy." She's not sure whether any official came by afterward to see the changes she'd made.
But a few weeks ago, a painter dispatched by the San Francisco Unified School District "came and covered them all in a half hour with blue-gray paint," writes Netkin. "Now what do you think a child would be able to see in a smoky room?"
It took forever to get someone to come when her classroom was infested with rats, says Netkin, "yet after a violation like this, within a few weeks the murals are gone" with no discussion. See sfg.ly/13gjsfg.ly/13gjBPWBPW for images of the murals, Netkin's rejected fix, and the doors painted over.

The article was written by Leah Carchik for the SFGate, part of the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper 2/27/2013.