With a jar full of stones that she herself had gathered from the banks of the Noguera Pallaresa river as it passed through Sort, María Poch arrived one morning at a company dedicated to swimwear fashion, ready to give her first master class on color. It was Friday. And, at a large table in front of about fifteen designers and marketing and sales managers, she spread all the stones. And she told them: "I bring you these stones because color is this. If you are capable of making a collection of swimsuits based on these stones, I will leave through the same door I came in through."
Next to that river in the middle of the Pyrenean mountains, María, with family roots in Pallars, had received great inspiration: "We are all nature, we are color and we are pigments. The same ones that the body carries are carried by the earth, by nature which, for me, has vital force."
How each individual experiences color, what is the effect of each color on people, what a certain color says about us... María set out to answer all these questions. And, to do so, and to transmit all her learning about it, she has dedicated forty years of her life. "My strength is to show all the inner life of color, to bring it closer to the person, to move with color. And to provide resources, solid strategies, short-term and long-term, so that color manifests itself in its maximum splendor. I am passionate about helping my students rediscover true color and enabling them to use it as a beautiful medium in itself."
With these words, María Poch places us in her world, which is the world of color. "All my life I have wanted to know what color says." I chose Fine Arts studies because I loved to paint, but I immediately realized that with color I was very demanding," while around her, little attention was paid to that element that she considered so valuable.
The starting point
When María was sixteen, she traveled to Cantabria to visit the prehistoric caves ofAltamira. That experience marked a before and after in her conception of color. There could be nothing more revolutionary for her than the discovery of that origin, a crucial point in that path towards the truth about color that she was seeking. Her reflection was: "If man is capable of painting on rock, with blood red, black charcoal, calcite, which is a white material we find everywhere, like the white of plaster, and ocher, which is an iron oxide that dominates throughout the geology of the earth, because it is burnt matter, then I also don't need more than these four pigments to compose my color palette. It seemed wonderful to me," she expresses.And until today, these naturally obtained colors have been the basis of Maria's daily work. "From pigments that I mix with binders and that I paint by hand, I can explain what each tone is composed of, how one shade of tone differs from another shade, and how they resemble each other." Taking a look at this way of working, you would say that the probabilities of nuances are infinite. The mastery of color that Maria has been consolidating with such perseverance and curiosity means that, on her walks in the mountains, any color tells her a story; each tone breathes a life. That's why, "from multiple materials and matters, I can approximate color through textures and touch, light and shadows. And we find everything in nature; you just have to open your eyes, observe and discover how colors interact, and feel that everything is within our reach. You just have to know how to look."
This is how María created her own method for teaching color. "A painting, a work of art, is a staging, an orchestration of color, and I explain to my students how they will conduct that orchestra." With her master classes, the result of much personal research, María has become a kind of loudspeaker for color, making it speak and teaching how to listen to it carefully, so that color itself transforms into a teacher of emotions and sensations, bringing out all its truth, as a tool of beauty for anyone. In this sense, Bauhaus, the German school of crafts, arts, design, and architecture, has been a good reference for her, as an example of a school that invited painters to give color classes. With Bauhaus, she realized that everything she could teach about color had to be eminently practical.
Confluence of Disciplines
She felt a great desire to delve into color, to enter and contextualize it. And she intuited that, to do so, art history was not enough. Feeling, wisdom, movement, vital needs at each moment of life mark the moment of choosing a color that we put in contact with our skin or that we place in our closest environment. She thought about which academic subjects, such as symbology, philosophy, or sociology, would give her good clues for her research and, above all, to know how to argue what her sensibility has always guided, this intimate and universal dialogue with the color palette.To gain some learning and inspiration from all those disciplines new to her, but promising useful content, María attended some university courses as an auditor each year. Perhaps without being too aware, she was doing what her father had always done: enriching everything she did, every mission she undertook, with stimuli, information, knowledge, and relationships with worlds diverse from her own.
María is the daughter of Joan Poch, a creator and entrepreneur from Igualada, with a brilliant mind, who demonstrated the ability to innovate with ideas ahead of his time. Joan Poch wrote a piece of fashion history. He created printed leather. It was an extremely refined suede. "To do it, he had been inspired by Renaissance engravings," explains María. Her father also surprised the international fashion world by creating sweaters made of a giant mesh, knitted with large needles that he managed to adapt to a machine in his factory. And he knew how to combine napa, a very fine leather, with that knit. He combined a suede body with mohair wool sleeves and vice versa. He played with color and material, and designed reversible pieces. "He was in love with material and what he wanted to do, he could do in New York and Paris because in those international fashion capitals they then knew how to read his innovation," she comments.
The history of clothing, for him, also fell short; he had to enter into dialogue with disciplines that allowed him to go further, to transcend the visible and the invisible, to be able to touch the essence of the human being. He was inspired by readings of Isaac Asimov and the inspiring extra-planetary worlds and lives. "He was always very faithful to his sensibility. He was a very spiritual man. He died at fifty-eight years old."
In María's hands, the books of René Girard and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe have enriched her universe of study on color. From Girard, specifically, she was very inspired by the theory of mimetic desire, according to which all our desires come from other people. And this mimetism fascinates her, especially seeing how animals use color to camouflage themselves, to survive. Harmony, compensation, contrast, the balances that make us say that everything in nature is perfect is what reinforces the credibility of María's sensibility towards color. Nature in its pure state makes her theory credible.
The grammar of color
"The appearance of color is ephemeral," says the color master. "It can be that and the complete opposite. It varies. But what is the only stable thing that no one can take away from color? Its beauty. Color isbeautifulin itself; we cannot make it less beautiful. To make it as it is, to give it its intrinsic value, we have to learn its grammar, its music, how they combine and dialogue with each other, also with the world around them. Depending on many elements, a color will speak or be silent. You have to give it the precise environment for it to express itself." That a color transmits freshness, vigor or warmth "will depend on its location, on what it has next to it," she comments.And the favorite color, how does it manage to conquer us? The expert answers: "The favorite color is a natural color in you. You have a skin and you deduce with which colors you look better. You become familiar with certain colors ---and this comes with us---, with what they taught you as a child and everything you learned from the experiences that were part of your history. You change as you learn more things. The more things you see, the more colors you discover and the more colors you love." Difficult, then, with all the love that María has put into the world of color, to choose one. She chooses two: white and red. "White, as a silent color that makes itself seen and is light, and I have dark skin, a greenish ocher; therefore, white makes my skin color stand out. I have always liked white. It is strident, but we don't wear it because it gets dirty and has to be washed more," she explains. "Red wraps me, any ocher red gives me strength to go outside," she says.