And welcome to the delights of English spelling; it’s not enough that it has very little to do with the way words sound, it has to vary from place to place just to confuse us further. Anyway, Ailsa of Where’s My Backpack, She Who Invents Travel Themes, is from Ireland, so she spells this week’s theme “grey”. But I was taught to write “gray”, so I will.
As colors go, gray has a bad reputation, and this first picture shows why.
These are houses for iron workers and glass makers at Batsto Village in New Jersey. When they were newly built, I suppose the unpainted wood was various shades of light brown. Not any more. They’re gray now.
On the other hand, this building in Venice is much too exuberantly baroque to look even a little bit depressed, no matter how gray it is.
Moving forward a few centuries, there’s the architecture in Center City Philadelphia – if these office buildings didn’t have so many windows that insist on reflecting the blue sky, they’d all be thoroughly gray.
The meeting room in Independence Hall (Philadelphia, too) is painted gray and cream.
And then there’s artistic gray –
A lady from an Impressionist painting, turned three-dimensional to visit a sculpture garden…
Gray stone, cut into two parts that seem to be trying to rejoin…
And gleaming gray metal.
So many grays, all so different.
Our house is painted grey ( 😉 ) Apparently in a street of red brick it is quite a landmark. That didn’t occur to me until we were told, lol.
That would make it a landmark!
(A very small landmark 😂)
the English spell it grey and the Americans (who cannot spell for toffee :D) spell if gray means the same, – a shade between black and white. Good to see you back.
Ah well, the English think they need an extra vowel to spell “color” 😉 …it’s good to be back.
we were here first so we must be right – hahaha 😀
😀
I rather like the weathered wood – I suppose I have pleasant associations with it, like driftwood and my 30-year-old garden bench with its superlative crop of lichens reminding me how lucky I am to live in clean air.
Some of my lack of enthusiasm for those houses comes from going inside and getting a sense of what they were like to live in – hot (in summer) and crowded with large families in a few small rooms. Probably cold and drafty in winter, too.
None of which can be blamed on the color of the wood, I admit.