CMC Part 2

Why We Do This: Spray paint collecting explained in three colors.

By JoeWelcome CMC

Part 2: Hot Pink, Radical Modernist (read Part 1)

Spray paint collectors, like most obsessed collectors, thrive on the personal connection they feel with the objects they treasure. The stuff that drives the collector is, simply put, a matter of passion; conversely, it’s the lack of that passion that makes others wonder what the hell it is we’re so excited about. Collectors (spray paint or otherwise) at their best try to understand the context and the time of the era they collect. The Zeitgeist if you will. This doesn’t mean that we who collect the 1970s wear bell-bottoms, or those who collect the 1920s make gin in their bathtubs. Instead, it’s what we call having a historical imagination. This is a carefully developed ability to mentally view an object in its time and place to weigh its actual value. Colors for us are not simply hues and shades of reflected light as seen through a human retina. They hold within them great context, history, and yes, even human emotion that a few shades difference may be a complete change of a color’s character. Case in point: what happened about fifty years ago to good old soft pink.

 

Color trends are a huge part of the paint business and the interior decor world. Part of why spray paint was such a technological step forward is that it put these new trends in the hands of the consumer, who could be up to date with only a few dollars and the push of a spray cap. Fashion trends are as critical in paint color as they are in clothing. Spray paint collectors know how popular colors such as seafoam green and turquoise were in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, for example. These smooth and calm colors of that time reflected (in the US, for some anyhow) leisure, convenience, and the post-war affluence of the era. And then what happened, history students? Assassinations, societal upheaval, war, radically opposed political systems, sex as spread through rock and roll, protests, drugs, and a whole lot of scary and uncertain change. We come to the pivotal year of 1968.

 

I know, you’re asking, but what happened to the paint? Pink got bumrushed by the equivalent of a student radical, a “social agitator” that took the soft, easy pink of the past, tore it up and spat on its corpse. Baby Pink was the pleasant color you dressed your baby daughter, and Hot Pink was the color she wore to burn her bra. Not many colors got supplanted by a whole new shade, and Pink never really recovered. Hot Pink equaled color wheel controversy with different companies buying in or just ignoring it altogether. Hot meant something different in a time of napalm and race riots. Rust-Oleum conservatively bowed out of the Pink business entirely, retiring Coral Pink in the early ‘70s. Stunned, they didn’t produce any Pink until the ‘90s– close your eyes and you can see the suits at Rust-Oleum cowering and waiting out “the fad.” Krylon debuted Hot Pink with their 1968 “Now Colors” (with Avocado; see part one of this series), accepted the new reality and kept Hot Pink active through 1994. Krylon maintained Pastel Pink intermittently, strangely rebranding it in the ‘90s as Pink Pastel, but Hot Pink was such a shockwave that they attempted an even lustier pink, the crazy rare Hot Raspberry. We dare you to find a Pink from then that conveys sexuality more than Hot Raspberry. The innovators at Krylon clearly decided to really let it all hang out– if Hot Pink was Hugh Hefner, then Hot Raspberry was Larry Flynt. Predictably, the public wasn’t ready and the color barely lasted 5 years. We at CMC say, make paint not war.

In Hot Pink we find the catalyst that brought out an era of spray paint colors that all dared each other to go further, and a time when there were no rules in naming your colors. Imagine a time when a color could be dangerous and Hot Pink is your agent of change. In spray paint, the 1970s are the golden age of wild colors and bolder-than-the-last color names, and who was at the picket line from the start, representing the counterculture, and demanding more than your parents’ old colors? Burn baby burn.