COLOUR COLOUR COLOUR
“Every perception of colour is an illusion…we do not see colours as they really are.”
Josef Albers, Homage to the Square: Festive (1967)
The KING of colour…
Colour is a trickster. It is relative, perceptually fluid, contextual.
It is one thing over here, another over there.
Because of this it can be a real pain. But it can also be pure perceptual and emotional pleasure. It is a lifetime of work to learn to handle it, roll with it, know it, dance with it. I love colour.
Colour was the reason I became a painter in the first place. I loved to draw, but I needed the intensity and saturation of paint to really smack me in the face with all that COLOUR SENSATION.
Honestly, I’ve tried more neutral colours, but I just can’t. I am physically and morally against beige.
I wish I could be more strategic about colour sometimes. If I was clever I could sneak in some Pantone colours of the year (if you see Mocha Mousse appearing in my paintings: shoot me…) or page through Vogue Living to get the low-down on what colours are trending.
But at the end of the day it is me making the paintings and I am forced to hang out with them for long, long periods of time. So the colours I work with are those that I am (for better or worse) drawn to, obsessed by, or mystified by. It is a palpable, physical thing, and I am possessed by different colours at different times. I can look back on some years of paintings and just think ‘blergh, what was I thinking…?’ But at the time, these were the colours that pulled me in.
So, where do my colours come from?
As I move through different colour palettes there can sometimes be clues as to where they come from. At the moment my palette is dominated by orange and green. ORANGE AND GREEN.
Once I lock into a colour palette I start noticing it all around me. This current chromatic obsession has felt like a natural progression from the pinks, peaches and greens from the works in my 2024 exhibition Pattern Evolution.
But I think it really started percolating into my perceptions through our trip to the Northern Territory last year.
My colours have important jobs to do in my paintings (balancing form, asserting depth, creating optical ZING or HUM in your eyeballs) but generally representing the real world is not part of that job description. The colours, and works, are abstract - they are not there to mimic (in a literal way) the things found in the world.
If the colours make some reference to nature (clouds, storms, lakes, creeks) this allusion is something that I can discover or attribute once the work is done, but it is not an end point I deliberately work towards.
But…those colours up north just really landed. They saturated me, burned into me.
I wasn’t an orange person. I don’t really like orange. At least I thought I didn’t like orange. But after that, orange and green really stuck.
And then, suddenly, orange and green were EVERYWHERE (how could I not notice them before…?) These colours just kept showing up through all the subsequent seasons of Melbourne; through all the colours and light of spring and summer. Orange and green just burned, and glowed, and sang, and vibrated and finally exploded with a glorious finale in this year’s lingering autumn, with ALL the stupidly gorgeous golden hazy mornings and afternoons - the lowering sun filtering everything through this ORANGE lens of intensity.
Now, I’ve got to hold onto those sensations and emotions in my mind (reference photos also help…) because at the moment, the colours surrounding me are grey, green, pale and washed out, in the drizzly thick of our grim winter. I need to hold onto that warmth (ORANGE) and channel this into my work.
Because colour is colour (so mercurial, such a Gemini…) it can sometimes take a while for it to WORK (this seems to be an emerging theme in all this writing - newsflash: ART TAKES TIME TO WORK…)
With the layering of more translucent glazes of colour and repetitive brush-strokes in the new works, you can see the evolution of the colours and each subsequent layer is influenced by what has come before it. You can see the decisions I’ve made, and the history of getting to that final colour destination.
With previous works, my use of paint and colour was flat, matte and completely opaque, which hid that backstory. It might have APPEARED that the final colours just happened, they just WORKED and that was that. But, hiding beneath that opaque surface was (usually) multiple layers of me trying different colours out, flailing around trying to hone in on just the right combination or hue.
And, look, sometimes I think I might deliberately make it hard for myself because I just need a problem to solve. Putting down jarring colours at the start is like giving my little monkey-colour-brain a puzzle, some work. Great! Let's get started fixing this thing.
I experience a wrong colour (and of course ‘wrong’ is always so subjective…one person’s NO is another person's YES) as a kind of pervasive irritation when I look at the work, a gut feeling, a ‘badness’ that needs to be dealt with. I can’t look at it without feeling this …edginess and anxiety…and I just need to keep on working until it is ‘right’ and that feeling goes away.
All artists build up their own ‘antennas’ - sensitivities to different aspects of their work. Mine is for form, pattern and colour, but for others it might be the quality of line or surface, a certain mood or emotional tone, a relationship between objects. Writers build up sensitivity to words, sentences, structure; musicians to melody, rhythm, harmony.
Matt is a former sound engineer, and has a sensitivity to sound that I just DO NOT possess. His antenna has been tuned to sound.
If we’re watching a show together where the sound has been badly engineered, he will squirm and cringe, experiencing low-level pain at the poor quality of the sound balance. And I will just sit there, happy as a clam, absorbed in the plot.
Him: “How can you listen to this?” Me: “Whaa…?”
My colour antenna has been built up over a lifetime of dealing with this tricksy little prankster COLOUR.
Still SO MUCH MORE to explore… (to stuff up…) and then to make it somehow work, all over again.
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