A visit to the UCL Slade Word/Image Forum event this week triggered this week’s writing prompt.

Julia Vogl designed a piece called Preference, in which you progressed along a hopscotch style board making choices between two things or concepts - pen/pencil ; mittens/gloves, etc. ; and, finally, believer/non-believer. The board used the colour spectrum plus black and white, and reminded me of the apocryphal stories of library assistants rearranging libraries into size and colour order. It also reminded me of the topic map web displays we often use to chart semantic relationships.

Certainly, it felt right that the final choice, believer/non-believer should be black and white. It’s odd how some concepts have a definite colour that works for them, like red for anger and blue for the sea (when I worked at the Admiralty Library, we certainly bound our books in navy blue).

So, this week’s exercise is simple:

1. Pick 5 colours. Write them across the top of a piece of paper.

2. Underneath write as many concepts (abstract ideas) that you associate with each colour.

3. Draw a line.

4. Below the line, write as many concrete nouns that you associate with each colour.

5. Are the concrete nouns and abstract concepts related to each other? Choose 2-3 unlikely pairings and freewrite for five minutes.

Is the resulting draft realistic, surrealistic, or a mixture of the two? At the very least it should be metaphysical but rooted in some concrete imagery.