All posts by Rosie Lesso

FIERY RED was a red-hot tool in the hands of Spanish painter and printmaker Joan Miro, adding flashes of intense, blazing heat to his daring Surrealist designs. He developed a deeply personal language that was playful and child-like, made up of swirling biomorphic forms and scattered geometric shapes coupled with brilliant dashes of black calligraphic…

Abstract Expressionist painter Willem De Kooning was obsessed with pink, making it a defining feature in many of his most renowned works of art. These include his formative paintings of women, caught up in great tangles and ribbons of expressive colour. While De Kooning eventually abandoned these figurative references for a language of pure abstraction,…

French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cezanne spent much of his adult life in Provence, and his mature paintings were a response to his immediate environment, conveying the light, hazy colours and undulating forms of the South of France. Pale, airy blues like PROVENCE were a recurring feature, spreading out across vast stretches of cloudless sky, craggy…

When looking at the paintings and prints of contemporary artist Peter Doig, it is easy to link his work with the great expressionist painters of art history, from Henri Matisse to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Paul Gauguin and Edvard Munch. Yet Doig cannily adds his own contemporary twist, through electrifyingly bright, iridescent colours like…

Alex Katz has a crisp, cool, and minimal way of capturing modern life, conveying it with breezy, airy brushstrokes and simple, vibrant colours. From early in his career, he has painted the small, yet enjoyable moments of life as they unfold around him; people at parties, his wife in the snow, buildings glinting at night…

Throughout her long and varied career, American Abstract Expressionist and Colour Field painter Helen Frankenthaler often worked with pale, pastel pinks like CRYSTAL ROSE, letting them spill out across her paintings and prints in fluid, watery stains. With these cool, pale hues spread out across vast stretches of canvas, paper, wood or board she invoked…

American Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko spent his lifetime mastering the emotional impact of colour, playing with how varying intensities of hues, built up in layer upon layer with his distinctive feathered brushstrokes could infuse his paintings and prints with the depths of our raw, exposed feelings. Vivid shades of sunshine yellow like EMPIRE YELLOW…

St Ives painter Ben Nicholson captured the crisp, fresh and invigorating air of the Cornish landscape in vivid shades of blue like SKYLIGHT, along with pale greys, soft beiges, and the occasional flashes of bold primary hues. Though he shifted through various styles in a long and prolific career, ranging from expressive landscapes to geometric…

The tactile, shimmering silver of PEARL GREY made its way into the late work of American Pop and conceptual artist Ed Ruscha, forming the uneven patinas and tactile textures of old silver screen movies. For Ruscha, who has lived much of his adult life in Los Angeles, this luminescent shade of pale grey became a…