Category Archives: COLOUR SERIES

Agnes Martin’s shimmering, Minimalist abstractions are infused with pale, crystalline light, capturing the indistinct atmosphere of half-forgotten memories. Soft, baby blues like LIGHT BLUE were a recurring feature in her art, suggesting hazy, distant skies opening out across an imaginary (or half-remembered) horizon. She demonstrates how this colour is striking and commanding enough to be…

Crisp, clear and direct, the bold colour of ROYAL BLUE has fascinated artists for centuries. Artists have become obsessive about this shade of blue, returning to it again and again for its ability to add dramatic tension and theatrical impact to their art. Those who have fallen for this colour’s spell have realised this shade…

ARCTIC linen’s dark turquoise is loaded with associations, from the azure blue of a sunlit sky to the slippery surface of still, frozen water. Artists throughout the centuries have embraced this sharp, icy colour for its ability to bring passages of crisp cold freshness into their art. But there is also a deeper, emotive potential…

Fresh, cool air seems to radiate through French painter Robert Delaunay’s art, conveyed with luminous pastel shades like FRENCH LILAC. A Parisian through and through, Delaunay dedicated much of his life to painting the city of lights as it transformed into an urban mecca before his eyes, shifting from a small city to into a…

French painter Pierre Soulages made a career out of painting with shades of black like ANTHRACITE, sweeping it in broad, confident gestures across paper and canvas. His stark, minimal designs nod towards the simple confidence of cave paintings and Japanese calligraphy, with loose marks crisscrossing over one another to create the sensations of depth, space…

Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell brought swirling tornadoes of colour into her art, and BLUE APATITE was one of her favourites. She loved how this rich teal blue could energise her paintings with the colour of electricity, twirling this way and that in dynamized ribbons, or pooling into watery patches of translucency. Though her densely patterned…

Colour was a driving force in the Surrealist art of Joan Miro, pulsing through his images with a passionate and rhythmic energy. He played with all the colours of the rainbow throughout his long and prolific career, exploring how curious and unexpected relationships could be discovered between them. The fresh, cool and minty shade of…

Raoul Dufy’s art was a celebration of life, in all its stunning, technicolour glory. He painted with light, airy brushstrokes and intense colours like MEDITERRANEAN BLUE, illustrating boundless optimism and the endless days of lazy, sunlit summer. Dufy spent much of his career painting along the Mediterranean coastlines of France, and his paintings capture the…

Soft, delicate pinks like BLUSH linen are a recurring feature in Cecily Browns rich, expressionistic paintings, conveying nude flesh, spring blossoms in the sunlight, or freshly fallen snow, painted with the fluttering decadence of the Baroque era once led by Jean-Honore Fragonard. A leading New York artist since the early aughts, Brown has been painting…

In her sparse, elemental canvases, British artist Sandra Blow captures fragile, fleeting moments, often bleached out with HEATHER linen’s cold, hazy light. A pioneering abstract artist of the 1950s, Blow challenged the macho, male-led school of Abstract Expressionism with a surprising informality, incorporating unexpected found materials such as sawdust, sackcloth and plaster alongside pale colours…

Painter, poet, filmmaker and sculptor, Danish artist Per Kirkeby had a prolific practice spanning multiple styles, but underpinning his ideas was a fascination with the structures and patterns of nature. The fertile, olive shade of green in DRIED HERB Linen appeared often in his evocative, expressive paintings, a colour that allowed him to express the…

MAROON Linen’s deep, dark red often appears in the art of German painter Gerhard Richter, smeared across his canvases in daring streaks of deliciously thick oil paint. One of the most prominent living painters in the world, Richter’s art has encompassed a huge range of styles, from monochrome photorealism to expressive abstraction and almost everything…

Richard Diebenkorn is one of the greatest colourists in the history of American art. Throughout his long and varied career, he moved through various styles of figuration and abstraction, but it was always an emphasis on the expressive properties of bold, brilliantly bright colour that he returned to over and over again. In soaring shades…

There is a quiet, entrancing magic to Marc Chagall’s art, a quality that allows us to escape the challenges of life, if even just for the briefest interludes. Deep indigo blues like BLUE WHALE appear often, invoking the dark blue air of dusk, when day turns into night and the mind slowly shifts into a…

British painter Francis Bacon made some of the rawest and most visually arresting images of the late 20th century. A true painter’s painter, Bacon embraced the viscous, tactile energy of oil paint, applying it in great streaks and swathes to emphasise the emotional impact of his brutally confrontational subjects. These included contorted bodies and faces,…