American

I have this love for the old American (19thC, and Gilded Age and 1930s) colours and materials, now that I have identified it, recognized it. The matt, the powdery dulled colours that go with the stone (brownstone) and old brick; and with the ethos of Protestant para-religious public buildings with their halls and public areas, their entrances, doors, windows, declarations and invitations, injunctions. Gunpowder grey, dullest pink, and blue, and creamy rich-dull red, thickly lined with absorbed blacks; the gold itself turned inwards, hardly a radiance. The flat, thudlike echo of light; which slows the eye.
Entrance to the Waldorf Astoria, inside of Tiffany's, faintly funereal.

And then the glint the amazing sharpness of anything steel and mirror and metal. That's not America but New York sea light. East Coast light. Every single car here is an amazing spectacle. The fluid, swift! light, smooth so that you breathe fresh.