When Colour Takes Control

Freedom sounds romantic until you’re standing in front of a blank canvas with no idea what to do first.

Most of the time I begin with a background — a field of colour that sets the mood and gives the painting somewhere to start. It’s scaffolding, not decoration. It gives the surface weight and direction.

But sometimes there’s no base. Just the first stroke landing on white. Those are harder. One decision sets everything in motion.

Because the first mark creates gravity. It demands a response.

I don’t think about colour symbolically. Colour is energy. Temperature. Weight. A bright yellow can throw everything off. A dark blue can hold the whole painting together.

Once the painting is moving, the job isn’t to add more — it’s to respond with the next colour. Sometimes that means painting over something you liked. If it weakens the whole piece, it has to go.

For reasons I don’t fully analyse, many of my paintings finish with a splash of metallic paint. It’s not decoration. It’s punctuation. A shift in light. A small refusal to be entirely matte.

Metallic paint behaves differently. It catches light unpredictably. It changes as you move across the surface. It introduces another variable at the last moment.

Maybe that’s the point.

Even at the end, I don’t want the painting to feel completely fixed. I want it to feel alive — responsive to the viewer, to the room, to the time of day.

Because even though I never know where a painting will end up, I do know this: once it starts, it begins to set its own direction. My job is to respond with colour carefully enough not to force it somewhere it doesn’t want to go.

And to stop before I ruin it.