Yesterday I saw this "KARLBOX" presented in the KaDeWe in Berlin. Hundreds of beautiful colour pencils, crayons and pencils. For the
Ridiculous.
Every real artist - Rachel, Tom and Cro know that of course - needs good 'tools', and they have their price, but even a layman as I know that you mix most of your colour hues yourself - with a lot less pencils than those 72 in my Faber Castell Artists' Watercolour Pencils box.
When I stand in a drugstore in front of a shelf of 100 cream jars all promising everything under the sun - and we all know that in the end it all comes down to oil & water! - it happens that I walk out of the drugstore without buying anything.
An overload of choice, scientists found out, stands in no correlation to happiness - it produces - and do I really need a scientist to tell me this? - STRESS.
So: it is nice to have choice. But not too much.
Because the most important 'things' you can't buy anyway: creativity and discipline and talent and inclination to work really hard for success. (And a little pinch of luck).
The funniest thing, Mr. Lagerfeld, is, that YOU prefer BLACK.
Which reminds me of a passage in a German children's book, König Mauzenberger: eagerly the King (Cat) mixed all the beautiful colours he had in his new paintbox. The result:
Which proves the old adage "less is more". A very good lesson.
ReplyDeleteYes, dear Emma - and too much confuses me.
DeleteBlack is easy.
ReplyDeleteAnd "safe". I prefer bright colours.
DeleteI am much the same when I am in a bookshop - all those hundreds of books - which to choose - my mind goes blank and I end up choosing nothing.
ReplyDeleteIn a bookshop the offers are overwhelming - but as I do not buy because of 'recommendations' (by bestseller lists) I just wait till a book "hums" at me.
DeleteCan you imagine, Britta having to put all those pencils in perfect color and numerical sequence every time!
ReplyDeleteGreetings Maria x
Oh Maria - I think you hit the nail right on the head - and I suspect that this order-fussiness/-neatness is just Mr. Lagerfeld's problem...
DeleteI would like to see a Karlbox. If I had one I don't think I would dare open it and it would stay on a shelf for ever and ever.
ReplyDeleteThe box is impressing, Rachel - beautiful wood - and of course greed inside me cries "I want to have it!" But as you say: if things are too exclusive one has "to force oneself" to use them - and often they make life more complicated as it already is.
DeleteYou're absolutely right about how having too many choices can create stress. The cereal aisle in our grocery store must have at least a hundred different kinds of cereal... so I pick my same boring box of Fiber One every single time. Still... I do remember a Christmas gift that gave me enormous pleasure as a child. It was a box of 64 crayons... with a built-in sharpener. Although I'd been perfectly happy with my standard boxes of 8 colors, that box of crayons was a treasure to me.
ReplyDeleteI can imagine your joy at Christmas when you got that box with 64 crayons! Do you remember which colour was used up first? (For a time for me that was lilac, because I drew heather landscapes en masse... :-)
DeleteWhen I was at college, certain students had a habit of scraping all their left-over paint, and depositing it under the bench they'd been sitting on. Occasionally we'd gather-up all this paint and mix it; the colour was known as 'benchend'.
ReplyDeleteAnd which colour did it come to? Brown? Or mixed colour?
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