In Living Color

At 19, Mary McMurray traveled to Crete and saw her future. She saw it in the spectacular mural work that lines the ancient Greek palaces. To McMurray, the art became the environment. A beautiful, serene environment. It was a revelation to the young art student from Cornell, who decided that she, too, could create uplifting environments.

Today McMurray smiles at her good fortune. Through her color consultation business, Art First Colors for Architecture, McMurray does just that for a variety of clients.

After graduating with degrees in fine art and art history, McMurray painted and became an interior designer. The New York native says she quickly realized she was interested only in color.

She researched the psychological effect color has on people. She repainted her apartment. The floors. The walls. Everything. She became a painting contractor because other painters couldn't get her colors right. They were either color-blind or didn't care, she says. She began working in faux finishes and teaching the techniques.

For 30 years, McMurray worked in a variety of aspects of design. It was just a few years ago, she says, that she was able to specialize in color consulting.

From the Flavel House Museum in Astoria to Zinc Bistrot in Northwest Portland to private homes, showrooms and churches, McMurray has been creating "beautiful, uplifting environments" through her use of color, whether historically correct or just right for the room.

Her formal studies, practical experience and research have made her a walking encyclopedia of color history. She has studied how color selection follows different aesthetics from generation to generation. Take, for example, landscape designer and architect Andrew Jackson Downing.

Houses before 1830 were almost universally painted white with green shutters, partly because Thomas Jefferson had an ideal of the American republic being like the ancient Roman republic, McMurray says. That's why Monticello has all those columns. Everything wood was painted white to make it look like marble. Even farmhouses were painted white, she says. It was a pure classical look.

Around 1830, there was a big backlash against white houses. Architects wrote about how horrible it was to paint a house white. Downing introduced color plates showing off the exterior colors he recommended for houses. He looked to nature, saying a house must never stand out against the landscape, but should blend in. Such a bow to nature remains a prevalent aesthetic in the Northwest.

And with a bow to Downing, McMurray works to reconnect with our environment through color. She doesn't work in trends, she says. Rather she looks for what's right for the architecture and for the space now and in years to come.

When asked to repaint the Flavel House in Astoria, McMurray used microscopic analysis to determine the original colors of the 1885 Victorian mansion built by Captain George Flavel, Columbia River bar pilot.

Before McMurray's work, the house was painted dark green and brown. McMurray says the previous painter had examined the layers of paint on the house to find the original color, but she theorizes that he found primer."When I did the microscopic analysis, the colors turned out like this," McMurray says, showing a photo of the Queen Anne mansion bathed in light stone colors with a darker trim. "So you can see that the Downing colors persisted."

Getting the color right for the era and the architecture can be a challenge for McMurray. Especially when a client falls in love with a color.

"I've had people insist I tell them the name of a color I've used elsewhere," McMurray says, her easy laughter filling the air. But what they don't understand, she says, is that not all colors work in all places.

McMurray smiles at the challenge.