Looking at the beauty of Painted Doors Aberdeen Instagram.
Aberdeen is a wonderful city full of culture and history. It is widely known as “The Granite City”, for its gothic-style buildings dotted throughout made out of well, granite.
I’m no architect but granite, at least in my mind is a very one-colour, boring style of building material. So, when your main building material is considered boring, how do you liven up the city? A group of people decided the best course of action was to mix the fabulous buildings with painted doors.
I stumbled across the Painted Doors Aberdeen Instagram by accident. I am pretty sure they just came up in my recommended accounts on the app and I immediately hit Follow.
Why am I fascinated by the painted doors?
I think doors as a thing are great because they let me into places? Who knows, I’ve never thought about it this much. But what I love about the painted doors is how something so regular, something that surrounds us, can stand out and become so unique, it’s one of the reasons why I love typography.
Some of my favourite painted doors
Not a sentence I thought I would be writing, but I have spent more time than I thought looking at the Painted Doors Aberdeen account trying to find what I think are the best pictures. Here are just a selection of some of my favourites:
This one is such a clever use of space. Bringing in two doors to complete one artwork. The continuation of art across two canvases is something I’ve always found tricky and admire when I see it done well. The colours really work well too, mixing the blue and orange with the black of the door is such a great idea to make the door stand out. Also, who doesn’t love a shark/eel/dragon with fire coming out of its mouth?
Like the original Instagram post here.
A beautiful design of intricate shapes balanced with some wonderful teal and pink colours makes this a shining example of new techniques and old styles. My favourite thing about this piece is most definitely the simply beautiful lined border and the mixture of wonderful colours.
This picture can be liked on Instagram.
This one is definitely my favourite. I absolutely love things messing with your perspective, like artists who use the corners of buildings to create an artwork or when Wil-E-Coyote made a super realistic tunnel to confuse the roadrunner. This artist uses the door to make it look like there is much more than meets the eye behind the door. Absolutely amazing.
There are many more painted doors to choose from.
These are just three of my favourite doors, but the curators of the Instagram account have many more details from, what I like to call, the Aberdeen door scene. I fully recommend visiting their Instagram account to see the full glory and variety of artwork that the curators are doing an amazing job of collecting.
Aberdeen isn’t alone in making its city unique.
Glasgow has also joined in with this, with their graffiti mural trail which any tourist can grab a leaflet and spend a day touring the city. I think, like Aberdeen’s painted doors, this adds another element to already interesting cities.
Interestingly there have been temporary installations of trails across the UK, like Gromit Unleashed in Bristol, so if you can’t get to Aberdeen or Glasgow for the permanent fixtures then I am sure there will be something near you in the future.