I was recently asked if I make my own colour. I’ve been thinking about this question a lot, so I thought I’d write about it.
Of course, I do make my own colour. As an artist, for me, everything starts with colour. It has an emotional pull, it’s alive, something to be felt. Some colours capture and hold our attention, some colours quickly let us go. What intrigues me the most is, what happens when the colours hold our gaze, our energy, and ground us. Is it the colour or our relationship with that colour?
The way I think about how I experience colour is ‘how long does the colour hold me?’ How slowly does the colour move within me? How does the colour make me feel?
The colour palette I’m currently working with, as I produce my latest collection ‘Sea Scripts’ is stirring something within me. I’ve made a mid-blue tone and I’m using this with gold and white. These colours move very slowly together, and they slow me down in a good way! When I look at these colours, I can feel my breath and my heart rate lower. I call this response the ‘colour voice’. As I grow as an artist, I’m learning that colour is a remembering of something.
Every colour has a voice. It’s taken years of practice for me to notice and even name what colour does to me. My colour palette changed in 2014 when I moved from London to the Southeast Coast of England. Anyone living by the sea will know that the colours of the sea, the sky, even the air, are forever changing from moment to moment. Nature organises colour in magical and random ways that would sometimes look unimaginable in the reality of a representational painting.
I can’t help but be influenced by the colours I live with on the outside. The emotions these colours evoke on the inside become the colours you see in my paintings. Once I inhabit the colours I breath in around me, it’s no surprise that these colours take on a voice and get to speak to me about what and who they are when they arrive on my canvas.
But the colour journey doesn’t end there. No two people will see colour the same way. This is the magic of colour! Each of us get to journey with colour our own way. When an observer looks at a painting and experiences a new colour, they can cede their own colour story in ‘their’ painting. Then the colour takes on a new voice, and the meditative journey of colour starts a new cycle.