Processes - Colour
Colour is an unknown factor, a complete mystery to me, and therefore something that seems worth investigating. Sometimes a work is begun with certain colour relationships in mind, yet I don’t know what informs that relationship. It seems similar to the way in which a melody might arise in our consciousness.
I have never worked at learning colour theory—why certain colours should or shouldn’t harmonise—just as I have never tried to understand how musical harmonies function. That lack of colour knowledge gives me a sense of ‘false confidence’ in my ability to match various ‘tunings’ and find ‘discordant harmonies’ that make perfect sense to me. The resulting images represent what I have seen or heard or experienced, rendered as faithfully as I have been able to.
My feeling about colour is of transcendence and levitation, or a lack of grounding to the earth, to physicality.
I may develop work of a subdued nature and then do a series that enables my mind to float for a while.
Colour gives buoyancy to some works, as opposed to those which are more graphic, where the images are like a scar, a burnt mark, something that etches itself upon the retina. With open fields of colour, a work allows me to lose a sense of anchorage.
Colour seems to imply the existence of a poetic state of being that is elsewhere, not of this world, and not labelled on a paint tube.
There are colours we see with our eyes open; they are the colours in the real world, like the blue of the sky or the black of a puma.
Yet every five or ten seconds we are blinking and seeing ‘black’, but do not register that.
If we close our eyes long enough, all sorts of colours appear, but not as they are visible in the real world.
If we rub our eyes at night time, we can ‘see’ phosphorescent rings, glowing apparitions or intensely saturated colour fields.
There are relationships between colours that inform my work as much as does the combination of various forms and symbols.
Colour allows me to assess these associations in a purely subconscious way, so that colour becomes part of a work’s internal sense of itself.
Explore the Processes
2. Collaborative Participation
3. Colour (You Are Here)