All posts by Rosie Lesso

American-French Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt had an innate ability to capture the crisp, sparkling freshness of daylight, painted with a bright palette of cool, pastel shades like EUCALYPTUS. Women and children were always at the centre of her paintings, often painted with great tenderness, but her real subject was the shimmering light falling all around…

Eerie, enigmatic silence circulates through the art of Swiss Symbolist Arnold Bocklin, conveying brooding places hovering between the waking and dreaming worlds. Bocklin predominantly painted the rough and tumble of the wilderness with a hazy light, punctuated by vivid, inky passages of darkness in shades of blue and dark purple like SWEET GRAPE. This colour…

Hot, wild pinks like RED TRAVIATA were part of British contemporary painter Howard Hodgkin’s vocabulary for decades. He swept passages of daring pink across his huge paintings – and even onto the surrounding frames – in large, gestural strokes, nestling them in amongst an unlikely array of ultramarine blues, acid greens or deep ochre yellows….

British painter and printmaker Gillian Ayres took the 20th century British art world by storm, creating wild and energised abstract paintings with all colours of the rainbow. Blue was one of her favourites, particularly grey-tinged shades of blue like BLUESTONE, for their ability to convey the illusion of sky or water sweeping through her vast…

Pioneering American artist Georgia O’Keeffe made a significant and long-lasting contribution to the history of art, with a daring new language of spare, stark simplicity that foreshadowed minimalist abstraction. Her mid-20th century art was an ode to nature and the wide-open space of the American outback, with its pale, bleached colours, huge skies and undulating…

Artemisia Gentileschi was the foremost female painter of the 17th century, working for prestigious clients across Rome, Florence, Venice and Naples. Like many painters of the Baroque era, her art was dark, brooding, and mysterious, telling tales of martyred women from throughout history with theatrical, directional lighting and indulgently painted fabrics. She often coupled earthy…

Glowing shades of pale yellow like GOLDEN GRAIN were a recurring feature in much of the Dutch-French Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh’s art. But nowhere more so than in his late series of wheat fields, which convey the low-lying autumn sunlight casting its warm radiance across the vast wheat fields that once dominated the south…

British painter Patrick Heron might just be one of the finest colourists of the entire 20th century. From his early days as a semi-figurative painter to his mature, pure abstraction, colour was always the defining principle that shaped the very nature of his art. He dived headfirst into the intensity of colour, working with the…