Category Archives: COLOUR SERIES

Drama is at the heart of Pierre Soulages’ art, and he achieves it through stark, theatrical means. A leader in 20th century European Abstract Expressionism, Soulages pioneered a bold, striking language, combining dark, enigmatic shades of indigo like MEDIEVAL BLUE with jet black, ultramarine and cerulean. He swept them in grand gestures across his artworks with…

ROYAL BLUE linen has the brilliant vibrancy of the Mediterranean Sea as it stretches outwards into an infinite horizon of azure blue. French painter Henri Matisse spent the majority of his life in Nice, where this same limitless blue light filtered into his mind’s eye, to be reimagined on canvas as fields of electrifying ultramarine….

Wassily Kandinsky lived and breathed colour, letting it infiltrate his entire life. His impassioned, ferocious paintings are a testament to this, with their noisy, clanging clashes of dazzling brilliance that exude a spirit of endless optimism and hope. He was a great leader in the 20th century European avant-garde, taking art into the great and…

Cubist painter Georges Braque celebrated the ambient power of warm, naturalistic colours throughout his career, bringing rich and appealing earthy tones like LODEN GREEN into many of his most famous paintings. A pioneering French Cubist alongside Pablo Picasso, Braque’s limited hues initially gave him room to focus on wildly experimental designs without letting bright colours…

Post-war British artist Patrick Heron was a colourist at heart, creating noisy, expressive paintings that seem to fizz and pop with life. He often brought sombre shades of purple, indigo and blue into his abstract paintings, letting it meander in velvety ribbons across white backgrounds, or seep into endless pools of darkness. BLUE ICE’s cool…

Cool, icy greys like VAPOR BLUE are a mainstay in Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s art, capturing the freezing, oceanic air of her native Cornwall. A leading member of the St Ives artists group in Cornwall, England, Barns-Graham was entranced by the steely silver of the ocean and its surrounding rocks. She painted, drew, and printed abstract visions…

American painter Roland Petersen makes paintings that are streaked with angular slabs of sunlight, slotted together with the appealing playfulness of a tangram puzzle. A leading member of the Bay Area Figurative School in 1960s San Francisco, Petersen was one of a generation who rejected Abstract Expressionism for a return to figuration, combining all the…

ROSE SMOKE’s sweet, tart pink coloured Robert Delaunay’s kaleidoscopic art, filling it with the bright freshness of summer. Delaunay was a leading figure in the early 20th century School of Paris, and his art encapsulated the joyful anticipation of the era, a time when rising industrial change promised a life of danger, thrill and adventure….

Expressionist artist Chaim Soutine made meaty, muscular paintings loaded with great slabs and strokes of paint; they twist, curl and contort across his canvases in an endless state of flux. Like many artists of the early 20th century Soutine painted a heightened, exaggerated version of the real world, one lit up by iridescent colours and…

Dazzling shades of blue like CERULEAN linen were a hallmark feature of Pablo Picasso’s late art, colouring it with the fresh light of the Mediterranean Sea. In his later years Picasso settled in the South of France, and, much like his contemporary Henri Matisse, the vivid, intense colours he encountered there ignited his artworks with…

Sean Scully’s art has a dense, hard-won quality that seems innately bound to the earth. Warm, metallic shades of grey like that of PEWTER Linen dominate his works of art, stacked into loose grids that resemble the hand-made structures of human civilization: drystone walls, slate rooves or careworn paving stones. Throughout his long career, Scully…

Sonia Delaunay was an unmistakable talent, a star of the 20th century who moved seamlessly between disciplines. Underpinning her practice was a fascination with colour and movement, and the ways it could capture the anticipation of rising modernity in Paris. The colour combinations she explored were often unusual and unexpected, creating jarring, clanging clashes of…

Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky was one of the 20th century’s greatest pioneers, spearheading a bold new language of abstraction that would alter the course of art history. He was particularly fascinated by the sonorous possibilities of colour, and how symphonic arrangements of light and dark could convey rich and complex emotions. No colour was out…

Pierre Bonnard’s intimiste paintings invite us into his own private world, a magical place where colour and light roam free. Though he is perhaps best celebrated for his scorching colour palette that heightened reality into a kaleidoscopic dream, he also brought in bright, cool shades like that of MIST Linen, letting them breeze through his…

In Marc Chagall’s swirling world of imaginative wonder, the rich, bluish purple hue of Majesty Linen appeared often, staining his canvases with a weighty, dramatic intensity. Throughout his career as a leading modernist, colour was a key component in Chagall’s art, not observed from nature but sprung forth from deep within his mind, expressing the…