Category Archives: COLOUR SERIES

French painter Gustave Courbet is best-known as the father of Realism, who painted stirring portrayals of ordinary life and real working people with great pathos and understanding. As such, rustic, naturalistic browns like BROWN STONE were a vital ingredient in his storytelling capacities, allowing him to convey the earthy, rugged realism of life as it…

Soft, dusty and muted pinks like SAHARA ROSE were a mainstay in the art of American minimalist artist Agnes Martin, painted in modulated, uneven textures to suggest faded memories and nostalgic longing. Martin was adept at combining simple geometric patterns like stripes, bands and grids with these muted, romantic colours – this was her way…

German, early 20th century artist Josef Albers spent his lifetime exploring the ambient properties of colour, and how their interactions could alter perceptions in the human eye. He experimented with just about every chromatic relationship possible, in a language of stark, simple geometric abstraction, allowing the radiance of his stacked colours to take centre stage….

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…

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….