FS Colour Series: KENYA inspired by Michael Armitage’s Fertile Nature

KENYA linen’s rich shade of red ochre seems intrinsically bound to nature, invoking rich, fertile soil and the careworn bark of ancient trees. Kenyan contemporary painter Michael Armitage has embraced this earthy colour to convey his homeland of Kenya, illustrating its wild and untameable beauty with an evocative array of ochre and sienna tinged hues….

Henri Matisse adored blue. It cropped up in almost all his paintings, not as pale, distant backgrounds, but as bold, punchy, and in-your-face colours like DEEP ULTRAMARINE Linen. Sometimes he sprinkled the colour like jewels in amongst a sea of reds, other times allowing brilliant shades of blue to entirely dominate the canvas with a…

Russian Symbolist painter Mikhail Vrubel created a magical twilight zone of dwindling daylight hours with grey, purple and blue, capturing the moment when reality blurs into dreams. FOLKSTONE GRAY linen’s subtle violet grey tone was one of his favourite colours, because it allowed him to create subtle areas of mid-toned shadow as the evening quietly…

POPPY SEED Linen’s cold, steel grey often made its way into British painter Roger Hilton’s abstract art, suggesting the dark, muffling clouds of an oncoming storm. Hilton was a leading figure in British postwar abstraction, and a member of the St Ives group alongside Ben Nicholson, Peter Lanyon and Wilhelmina Barnes Graham. Like them, his…