Seeing in Colour

Something interesting has happened since I started painting abstractly again. It is already changing the way I paint from observation.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been making small abstract oil paintings, thinking about colour, shape, proportion and space — how one area sits beside another, what carries visual weight and where the eye comes to rest. Somewhere in the process, I began to recognise something about the way I see.

I seem to notice the colour structure of a scene before I notice its details. A pale blue field. A dark green mass. A warm ochre shape. A small flash of brighter colour. The objects are there, of course, but underneath them I’m already organising what I see into larger relationships of colour, proportion and space. Once I realised this, a lot of things suddenly made sense.

I’ve always been drawn to close compositions, simple arrangements and large areas of colour. I like giving objects room to breathe. I’m often more excited by the relationship between a blue wall and an ochre table than by the object sitting between them. I just hadn’t consciously understood that this was how I was seeing.

This week I started three small still lifes and decided to approach them differently. Normally I would begin with a drawing, establish the objects and their proportions, and then gradually move towards colour and detail. This time I began with the colour blocks. I painted the largest areas first and looked at their proportions in much the same way I would when beginning an abstract painting. Only then did I loosely introduce the shapes of the objects. It was a revelation.

Instead of building a composition around a vase or plant, I was building a painting first. The objects could emerge from the colour structure rather than determining it. I still care about observation, light and the particular character of the things I paint. But I’m beginning to see that I don’t need to start with description.

Before a plant becomes a plant, it can simply be a dark irregular shape against a pale field. Before a vase becomes a vase, it can be a cool vertical shape interrupting a warmer colour. Before a tabletop becomes a tabletop, it is simply a large area of colour carrying visual weight across the painting. Thinking this way gives me much more freedom to simplify, crop, exaggerate and leave things out. It also helps explain why returning to abstraction has felt so natural.

The abstract work isn’t separate from my observational painting. It is revealing something about the way I have probably been looking all along. And the relationship works both ways.

Abstraction is teaching me to think about structure, proportion, negative space and colour before detail. Observation gives the abstract paintings their unexpected colours, irregular shapes, light and atmosphere. One keeps feeding the other.

Perhaps that is what feels most exciting about this stage of my work. I don’t have to choose between abstraction and representation. They are two different ways of exploring the same visual world. And at the moment, each one is helping me see the other more clearly.