Category Archives: COLOUR SERIES

MEDITERRANEAN BLUE is a dazzling, electrifyingly bright colour that conveys the soaring brilliance of summer. Artists through the generations have explored how this entrancing shade of turquoise blue can capture the light of the European coastline, encapsulating the azure blue of the ocean and the wide-open, cloudless skies overhead. We look at three pioneering French…

Pop artist Andy Warhol had an inimitable knack for capturing the essence of an object, animal or person, ramping up its impact with daring, electrifyingly bright shades of colour like RASPBERRY’s searing hot pink. His screen prints are arguably the most enduring aspect of his legacy, giving him room to experiment wildly with the same…

The pioneering Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi painted a world of rich, decadent and warm tones like MARSALA, which she coupled with dramatic, heightened chiaroscuro. Her paintings draw us into private worlds where theatrical, sometimes terrifying stories play out, or melancholic heroines are overcome with strong emotion. As the most successful female painter of her day,…

British 19th century painter John Constable painted the British landscape as a place of wild and unspoilt wonder, revelling in its curling old trees, mud-soaked ground and billowing, cloud-filled skies. He was fascinated by nature in all its grubby, dirty reality and often honed in on details other might choose to ignore or omit, like…

In 1891, at the age of 43 years, French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin left his life in Europe for Tahiti, in search of a mystical paradise untainted by the trappings of modernity. The paintings he made here are arguably the most celebrated of his entire career, reflecting the abundant landscape of Tahiti with a rich…

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…