Gallery: squaring the oranges

Orange is red brought nearer to humanity by yellow

Wassily Kandinsky

Orange is an attention-grabbing colour, shouting ‘look at me’! You can’t easily ignore an orange. It suggests optimism, vitality, happiness, warmth. For many it is a spiritual colour, worn for instance by the Buddhist monks of Southeast Asia. But it can be aggressive and harsh at times, and overpowering if used in large amounts.

We use the colour to draw attention to ourselves or to objects. Think of traffic cones, safety equipment, hi-vis clothing or the amber traffic light that warns us to be ready to stop.

Orange is also the colour of autumn of course, so a perfect choice by Terri for this month’s Sunday Stills colour challenge. And of course with September being Becky’s month of squares, with the theme of seven, I had to select just seven of my favourite orange images and square them. It’s forced me to be more selective than usual; a good thing, as I’ve featured orange a couple of times in the past. There was my Getting Warmer post earlier this year, and a previous Sunday Stills one focusing specifically on apricot shades.

So for this post I’ve tried to focus on some more recent orange finds, which means inevitably that you’ll recall seeing some of them before! However I hope the squaring, and the impact of seeing them all together, will provide sufficient difference for you to enjoy them again. And the last one was taken especially for this post.

The bonus un-squared orange in my feature  photo is a sunset over the western part of Newcastle, seen from the apartment we rented there last month.