Finding My Colours

My painting practice has been shifting around quite a bit lately.

I’ve been experimenting, following different ideas and returning to things I thought I might have moved away from. I’m trying not to worry too much about what any of that means just yet.

What I am noticing is that, no matter what I’m painting, colour remains one of the things I come back to again and again.

Recently I’ve started spending a little more time simply mixing colour. Nothing elaborate. Sometimes it is just ten or fifteen minutes with a few paints and a piece of paper, seeing what happens when one colour meets another. I began doing this because I realised I had been concentrating so much on process, value and composition that I hadn’t been thinking particularly carefully about colour.

When I looked back at some of the work, I could see colours I had reached for automatically rather than intentionally. That made me curious. What colours do I actually want to live with in a painting? The answer, it turns out, isn’t particularly straightforward.

I love natural colour, but not necessarily quiet colour. I’m drawn to colours that feel slightly complicated — greens that lean grey or blue, peach that has been knocked back with something earthy, violet that almost becomes brown, blue that feels smoky rather than clean. They are often the colours where I have to look twice.

And then I love the contrast of something much more saturated appearing in a small amount. A bright pink becomes more exciting beside a field of muted green. A vivid blue seems even stronger when most of the painting is soft and earthy. Perhaps I like colour most when there is some tension in it. Not everything saying the same thing at once.

The swatching has also reminded me that I don’t need a large palette to find complexity. A few colours mixed in different proportions can produce an enormous range. The interesting colours often aren’t the ones straight from the tube, but the unexpected mixtures that happen somewhere between them. There is something very freeing about discovering the colour world before I begin painting. It doesn’t mean deciding what the painting will look like. I still want the composition and shapes to develop as I work. It simply gives me a place to begin. The palette can be intentional while the painting remains unpredictable. I like that.

At a time when I’m not particularly interested in defining what kind of work I should be making, colour feels like a thread I can follow without needing an answer. I can begin with a muted green, a dusty pink or a strange blue-grey and see what grows around it. Maybe that is enough. I don’t need to know exactly what I want to paint every time I enter the studio. Sometimes finding the colours is the beginning.