I've got ink on my hands.

and EVEN WHEN things were more muted/neutral, the neutrality was OFFSET by ACCENT COLORS and HIGH CONTRAST between the wood tones and everything ELSE

ALSO AMERICAN COLONIAL INTERIORS POPPED OFF, Y'ALL (IN TERMS OF COLOR/COZINESS)

PEOPLE USED WHITEWASH AND COLORFUL TRIM OR EVEN JUST COLORFUL FURNITURE IF THEY COULD AFFORD TO DO SO

AND DON'T GET ME STARTED ON FRENCH AND BRITISH AND AMERICAN WALLPAPERS

"ELIZABETH" YOU CRY, "WHY ARE YOU BEING SO EXTRA THIS MORNING?! IT'S MONDAY"

Because, my friend, my war on GREIGE will NEVER end.

Historic interiors were filled with LIFE and LIGHT and COLOR. ALWAYS HAVE BEEN.

Part of the reason we don't see a lot of textile art is because, frankly, textiles tend to degrade over time - especially ones that had utility! And yes, pigments and weaving and dying all boosted the expense of things, when we were finally reliably block-printing fabrics and broad reams of paper, it was no longer just the wealthy who could afford pretty patterns!

In the Americas, a far wider variety of pigments also became available because of the abundance of... well, a shitton of flora and minerals, some of which weren't as common in Europe.

WHY THE HIGHLIGHTER COLORS? you ask.

CANDLES.

Those colors reflect candlelight and natural sunlight REALLY WELL.

Humans LOVE bright colors, it's NOT just a thing for kids. We live in a brilliant, vibrant, multifaceted world. We ALWAYS have.

(If ever you have the opportunity to visit the Stencil House at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont (pictured above at 3, 4, and 5), I highly recommend.)

And that's before you get into American painted murals:

Also, more often than you might think, they’re not actually promoting bigotry so much as “didn’t consider all the implications of something” or just used words that were polite then but considered offensive now.

"Some 6,000 years ago in the northern reaches of modern Latvia, a young woman died. Afterwards, a group of early humans buried her in an ancient, sacred place along a lakeshore. They carefully lowered her small teenage frame into the ground, gently placing a stone ax, 28 flint flakes, 15 blades, and a stone scraper beside her. Stained with ochre, the stone implements were part of her last rites. This young woman remained there thousands of years, until, when archaeologists discovered her along with more than 300 others in the 20th century. The site, known as Zvejnieki cemetery, is one of Europe’s largest Stone Age cemeteries.

Research conducted at Zvejnieki has often challenged longheld assumptions about gender roles in prehistoric Europe. For instance, the young woman interred in burial 211 described above is one of several women and children buried with stone axes at the site, upending the notion that axes only belonged to Stone Age men. Now, a new study published September 10 in the journal PLOS One again upends gender stereotypes, demonstrating that women and children were just as likely to be buried with stone tools as men. The woman in burial 211 alone was laid to rest with a staggering 45 different stone objects. 

(...)

This flies in the face of a decades-old stereotype that Stone Age women didn’t use stone tools as frequently as men. The women were too busy cooking, crafting, and caring for the family to bother with the stone tools used by men in hunting and building. Or so the outdated story went.

“Our findings overturn the old stereotype of ‘Man the Hunter,’”  Little said in a statement. Historically, this stereotype “has been a dominant theme in Stone Age studies, and has even influenced, on occasion, how some infants have even been sexed, on the basis that they were given lithic tools.”

French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Greek, Romanian: it has wonderful balance, so we will sensibly name it “level” - as in ⚖️, balance. It’s so rare that all of us come to such a nice consensus. Hopefully it’s not because, like, English rode in roughshod and -

English, spitting: dragonfly

French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Greek, Romanian and a whole host of others: normally you’re more with us than everyone else - did you … get that from the celts, or…?

Welsh: no. Fuckoff. snake’s servant

Irish - BIG NEEDLE

Basque, supportively - witch’s needle!

Swedish - troll’s spindle

Norwegian - eye sticker

Danish - goldsmith

Croatian - fairy’s horse

Finnish: wolf’s rod (?)

Hungarian - sieve-knitter

Turkish - little Joseph 😊

It looks like the “libellule” variants swept over a lot of older regional names, themes in which seemed to be snakes, magic, horses/riders, witches and devils, and needles. Normally it’s English words that do that, but in this case, English is going 🗣️ DRAGONFLY 🗣️ in a mild eddy of independence, and is clearly not guilty.

As far as we know today, dragons featured only in German witch trials from Thuringia, Saxony, and Bavaria, i.e. from the eastern parts of today’s Germany. [...] The belief in a connection between witchcraft and dragons seems to belong to the bedrock of witch beliefs in this area. “Dragon whore” (“Drachenhure”) was a common insult in sixteenth-century Saxony. Dragons featured in the oldest eastern German trials from the early sixteenth century, and they disappeared only in the early eighteenth century when the witch hunts themselves finally petered out.

Dillinger, Johannes. "The Dragon as a Household Spirit: Witchcraft and Economics in Early Modern and Modern Sources." Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, vol. 17 no. 2, 2022, p. 212-240. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mrw.2022.0024.

Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes), father and pups, family Canidae, BC, Canada