THE COLOURS THAT KEEP RETURNING

One of the strangest and most beautiful things about making art is that sometimes you don’t fully understand what you’re doing while you’re doing it. You simply follow what feels right.

Certain colours return. Certain shapes appear again and again. You paint them because something inside you says yes, even if you couldn’t explain why.

For me, red and blue have always been those colours.

I’ve tried to step away from them at times, wondering if something softer or more neutral might be easier to place in the world. But they always find their way back into the work.

Red flowers against fields of blue. Warmth sitting inside space.

For years I didn’t question it too much. It simply felt like the language my paintings wanted to speak.

Recently I was listening to an interview with filmmaker Chloé Zhao talking about her work on the film adaptation of Hamnet.

(I loved this book and then loved the movie. Honestly I did put off going to see it for a couple of weeks because I was worried it would be so sad that I would make a complete show of myself blubbering in the cinema, but then I heard everyone blubbers in the cinema watching this movie so I went, on my own so not so embarrassing.)

In the interview Chloe described how colour was used very intentionally within the costumes — how red and blue carried emotional symbolism throughout the film.

It was one of those quiet moments where something clicks.

Not because the idea was completely new, but because suddenly something you’ve been doing instinctively begins to make sense.

Red and blue.

Earth and sky.

Red feels rooted in the body — warmth, pulse, instinct, the ground beneath our feet.

Blue holds the opposite energy: breath, space, thought, possibility.

When the two meet, they create a kind of balance. A place where intensity and calm can exist at the same time.

(I've shared links to the video of the interview with Chloe Zhao here, because it was a really cool interview. I also share a great short video where the costume designer for the movie, Malgosia Turzanska, where she discusses her inspiration behind the costume and how it connects to the characters, the colour decisions and how they are part of telling the story.

Watch that here. In another life I dream of being a costume designer, fascinated)

Back to the painting....

Looking back at my own paintings, I can see that conversation happening again and again.

The red flower rising through fields of colour. The horizon lines. The sense of something grounded reaching toward something open.

None of this was planned in the beginning. It simply arrived through the act of painting.

And perhaps that is the quiet magic of the creative process. Sometimes the work knows what it is about long before we do.

We think we are making decisions, but often we are simply listening — following small instincts, colour choices, shapes that feel familiar. Over time the meaning begins to reveal itself. The work slowly tells us who we are. And in that way, painting feels a little less like inventing something and a little more like remembering something that was already there.

Perhaps that’s also why certain artworks speak to us so immediately.

We might not know exactly why we are drawn to a particular piece, only that something in it feels familiar. A colour combination, a shape, a quiet mood that mirrors something inside us.

It’s rarely logical. It’s more like recognition.

The same way a painting can reveal its meaning slowly to the artist who made it, it can also reveal something to the person who lives with it. A small moment of connection that doesn’t need explaining.

Maybe that’s the quiet conversation art holds between people.

A language made of colour, instinct and feeling.

And sometimes it finds us long before we understand why.

my latest workings....let's see where they go!

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