Movement in Colour by resident artist and writer Michaela Hall

Colour is defined as ‘the property possessed by an object of producing different sensations on the eye as a result of the way it reflects or emits light.’ In other words, colour may seem straightforward, that it is a static plane but it is in nature something that is full of movement. Colour is alive and moving in every possible way, and we see this for example, in the movement of the sky and the after glare of bright lights. However, artists such as the great painters have long sought to capture different colours and make them static on a flat surface with accuracy down to exact hues and tones. So, what about those artists who use colour in movement as a material in itself – how do they capture colour in its truest sense?

French conceptual artist Daniel Buren is famous for his large-scale installations in which he utilises the natural light in the gallery space to create areas of physical colour in the space that the viewer can interact with. In his 2014 exhibition ‘Catch as catch can: works in situ’ at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary art he exhibited in space with vast skylights and utilised these by covering them in different coloured films. Below on the ground sat six large mirrored panels facing in different directions at different angles and these worked with the panels and more importantly, the light coming through the panels to create rhythmic and vibrant colour in the space, that viewers could walk through and feel they were physically a part of. By exploring the natural light from the sky panels in his work, Buren allowed natural light to navigate how his installation would change and appear throughout the day as the sky changed, using the moving colours as a paint on the space as a painter would on a canvas.
While Buren uses the movement of colour in a physical environment, contemporary artist Sali Muller uses the same principles but on a flattened scale. Muller plays with the idea of how we would usually associate colour with a flat surface – that is to be a static painted or covered area that is not changeable. However, Muller uses iridescent materials and unconventional bases for her work such as safety glass, mirrors and foil to create combinations of colour and reflection. These works rely on the lighting of the environment in which they are shown like Buren’s work but also the angle of which the viewer looks at them in the space. This means that a viewer looking at one of Muller’s works will have more than one colour gradient, appearance and experience on offer. In ‘Down the Rabbit Hole’ (2021) dichroic foil along with angled mirrors and safety glass are used to create a piece that creates hues of pink and green from one angle and yellow and blue from another and in ‘Once Upon a Time’ (2020) Muller uses chrome and PMMA plastic to create multi-tonal iridescent mirrors reminiscent of fairy-tale stories (hence the title). These offer an incredibly vibrant rainbow spectrum to the viewer again with different reflections and angles offering different colour combinations.

In presenting their colour palette as moving and live, what both artists do here is allow the viewer to explore the very idea of colour itself without any boundaries. Colours are all around every day and some are more obvious than others. We know the sky is blue, the grass is green and that lights twinkle – but it’s often hard to access that in-between moment where colours are changeable, and we are reminded of the nature of colour and light itself. What Buren and Muller do in the discussed works is give us a space in which to access this in-between – colour as we know it, but completely different.

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House paint is vital.  by Abigail Fletcher-Drye

It is a thing, a lively object, slippery stuff that quietly (or perhaps not so quietly) cohabits our lives. 

House paint is a material that most people have experience with. However, the material of house paint has not always been an outfit of Do-it-yourself culture and tasty décor. Its roots sit firmly within the History of Art, within early cave paintings demonstrating the application of colour onto the porous surfaces of cave walls. 

 The material of paint for early humankind was produced through the alchemy of foraging and forging materials. The production of paint as a commodity has transformed over time. Converging firstly with the remit of Fine Arts and oil paint and diverging through industrial production to formulate the ready-mixed house paint we encounter today; user-friendly, consumable product. 

As a commodity, house paint is wet. A liquid product is hermetically sealed in containers, ready to be activated through the touch of the painter, the agent of decoration. Industrialisation removed the alchemy of production for the end user, a consumer hoping to capture the ephemeral quality of colour and install it within the home. The colour carries decrees of tasteful/tasteless judgments for those who share the space. The world of pigments and raw materials seemingly distant as juicy language entices the senses; clotted cream and raspberry dreams tantalizing the taste buds.

The raw materials of house paint are closer than one might first think. Water seeping through the building materials evaporating off the surface of the paint into the air. Paint oxidation as it dries, VOC (Volatile Organic Compounds) vaporizing into the air we breathe, the house paint engaging in active reactions beyond our human experience. Mostly paint sits quietly on the surface forming a thin eggshell amongst which we cohabit the space. Often paint will be installed on top of former layers of paint and at any one time, below the veneer of our familiar walled surroundings, there might be a number of layers of previous colour choices, perhaps by previous inhabitants of the space. Perhaps my rented bedroom was once upon a time painted blue or maybe further shades of insipid cream, the material of house paint revealing the intimate lives of former inhabitants.

This house paint has a life within the home beyond our experience of the space. Often lying dormant, its existence only comes to the surface during some sort of disturbance. The sanding of a wall might reveal lead material properties, threatening the safety and security of the home environment. The nourishment of tasty language conceals the poisonous and harmful effects that might lie within. All of a sudden the walls of our homes are no longer seen as barriers to the dangers that exist outside, but become cages of potential harm, leaking cocktails of chemicals seeping through the surfaces. The house when considered as a container invites questions around what is contained alongside us, the human actants amongst a host of other stuff. As such non-toxic healthy paint has emerged as a commodity, appealing not only to our senses but indeed our sensibilities. 

 Abigail Fletcher-Drye 

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/abigailfletcherstuff/?hl=en 

https://www.abigailfletcherdrye.com/

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 By - Artist Paul Butterworth

BIO- I am a third-year BA (Hons) Painting student at the University for the Creative Arts – Open College of the Arts campus (the UCA's distance learning/part-time campus) specialising in abstraction. I use paint like music. Not to copy music, as the languages are different, but to create something you can connect to, lose yourself in, and be moved by. I see colour as a material with substance and form so that when I am painting it feels as if I am sculpting rather than laying down paint on a flat surface. The surface is not something I look at because I am 'dancing' with the colours. I use oil paint because it is slow drying and allows an infinite number of changes. This suits my evolutionary process of looking, leaving, layering and revealing. A piece is finished when it lives in its own right and I can't help it anymore.

Written piece…

Colour is often said to be the property of a material and its meaning cultural. We say that blood is red and the sky blue, and in the West (I can’t speak for other parts of the world) that red is the colour of anger and blue of depression. Colour and shape quickly become symbolic, from religious symbols to commercial logos, so that sociologists and historians can read paintings like a book. However, I believe that colour is a is not a property of a material but is a material (in its own right) just as clay, marble, or wood.

 Of course, colour is not a solid, liquid, or gas so how can it be a material? My answer lies in differentiating between experience and knowledge. When we look at a block of concrete or a sunset, we experience them both as images in our head, it is our knowledge that differentiates them. We know we can’t pick up a sunset, that it doesn’t have a surface or a weight, and that we can’t scratch our knuckles on it.

 But, in normal life, we can’t separate knowledge from sight. Our brains are the most wonderful organs that make sense out of no sense. Our eyes, as biological sensors, take in light; we turn that light into electrical signals; and those signals pass into our brain which decodes them. What we ‘see’ is a product of our brains and not an absolute reality. Knowledge is an integral part of how our brain unscrambles the visual information into meaningful images and allows us to negotiate the world.

 So, if knowledge is part of seeing, and we know that colour isn’t a material, how can I ‘see’ colour as a material?

 Most of the time we are inside our heads (alone) looking out at the world. We are in the realm of conscious thought, words, language, and inner monologues. However, there are times when we are not inside our heads looking out at the world but are living in the moment. We lose the ‘I’ and become part of a ‘we’. This state is often seen as spiritual or religious but is one we have all experienced from being lost in a beautiful sunset to being enthralled at a concert.

 t’s easy to think of words as the only way of thinking, and not being a philosopher, I throw this open to the experts. But I believe that we think in all sorts of ways apart from words. The subconscious is difficult to talk about because we cannot ‘see’ it, only look at its effects. Freud is perhaps the most famous scientist to study the subconscious and there are huge debates about its function, but I think that most of us would agree that the subconscious exists.

 The brain makes sense of the world, and ‘contains’ both the conscious and subconscious, so materiality is a both a subjective and scientific reality. The subjective experience of reality experienced by our subconscious and the objective reality quantified by language and embodied in science.

 Which brings me to my canvas. When I am painting, I am not looking ‘at’ the colours but intuitively reacting to them as if I’m having a spontaneous conversation. Colour becomes a material, always in flux and always changing, so that when I am painting I feel like I am dancing with colour. The surface texture, pigment itself, and the material in which the pigment is embedded therefore become properties of colour rather than the colour being a property of another material.

 Finally, because we are all human, I believe that we all share subconscious elements. Our knowledge and feelings, for example, are all filtered through being a biological organism. If ever AI becomes sentient the experts all agree that it would experience and think very differently from biological organisms. So, beyond our different ideology and culture we have a shared subconsciousness.

 The joy of colour is that it can reach where no language can reach, it can unite and change us, it can take us out of our ‘I’ and connect us with the ‘we’. And by connecting to an artist through time and space it connects us to all humanity.

 Colour is a truly magical material.

Website

https://www.paulbutterworthartist.com/

Instagram account

https://www.instagram.com/paulbutterworthartist/

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artist - Kate Rossini

Website

curatecreatereimagine.com

Instagram account

curate_create_reimagine

Bio

Kate Rossini’s work is about exploring aspects of her own identity using surrealist techniques to access the subconscious mind - looking inwards to mine what is hidden - exploring the juxtaposition between methodologies that impose rules & elements of chance in creating work and those freed from rational control. Themes running through her work include: otherness, the feminine & totemic, underlying meaning/subversion, colour combinations/optical effects, working in repetition and with music for its meditative and spiritual quality – all centred around her own story and childhood memories. Spontaneity, allowing work to emerge from the process of doing, responding, and letting go gives her creative permission to be bolder and more experimental.
Description…

Louise Bourgeois and the use of colour - why her work on series: Spirals/Personages and insomnia drawings resonate with me and some of my own experiments using a limited palette.

'The colour blue – that is my colour -'

'and the colour blue means you have left the drabness of day-to-day reality to be transported into – not a world of fantasy, it's not a world of fantasy – but a world of freedom where you can say what you like and what you don't like. This has been expressed forever by the colour blue, which is really sky blue'.

Louise Bourgeois (1911 – 2010)

 Best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Louise Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker exploring a vast variety of themes over the course of her long career (domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, death and the unconscious) – all connected to events from her childhood.  The recounting of her early years was a fundamental part of her artistic expression/narrative: yet she left her adult life (her own experience of being a mother/wife/partner) out of her work by selecting her youngest memories to drive her visual language which she considered to be a therapeutic process.

 Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement. She has been an important inspiration to me as an artist on a journey to uncover my own visual language: one that speaks to my identity. With such a huge (and broad) body of work (Intimate Geographies - Robert Storr's work on The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois is hard to lift) I've been investigating her work with a focus on her series: Spirals, Insomnia Drawings and Personages

 Bourgeois explained her repeated return to the imagery of the spiral as representing control and freedom, the constant continuation of birth, life and rebirth as well as being a fundamental of nature. In Spirals (2005) she created a series of 12 woodcut prints on Japanese paper - arranged in a grid formation with nine of the prints in red ink, two black and one using blue ink, the spirals varying in thickness, shape and size, with some contained within the limits of the paper and others continuing beyond the picture plane. In her Insomnia Drawings made between 1994 and June 1995 she created a series of 220 sheets with drawings, sketches and poetic annotations at night, writing on various types of paper that she kept by her bed - usually in red biro/felt pen. In Personages Bourgeois created a series of totemic, wooden sculptures with Surrealist origins - created shortly after immigrating between 1947-1953 -these life-size sculptures were designed to be seen in groups, like social groups of standing figures acting as both physical and emotional stand-ins for the family/home she left.

  I chose to investigate these works in series as they all have an element of the subconscious beneath their meaning - tapping into something hidden or fundamental - automatic drawing/writing - symbolism and surrealism: which might help me on my quest to find what’s deep within me.

 Some of the aspects of these works that appeal and which resonate with include the following:

• in this series, she is seeking to make art in order to access and analyse hidden (but uncomfortable) feelings - resulting in a release from them

• she has a real focus on the feminine: totems, fabric, sewing, clothing (as an exercise in memory) as well as female constructs eg cages (cells), needles

• she uses the abstract and the familiar: the balancing of these two intrigues especially regarding my own subconscious thoughts

• the important use of symbols/metaphors within her work (for her the spider, as a metaphor for mother: protector/repairer)

• she uses text, autonomic drawing/writing as a cathartic process – a way of accessing inner (hidden) thoughts and feelings

• the deployment of a wide selection of media that is easily accessible, available or indeed modest - scraps, abandoned wood etc – aligns with my own with my thinking around sustainability, recycling and the significance of materials.

Above all, however, is the significance of colour. These are selected with meaning applied to them as the opening quotation concerning the colour blue makes clear. Her use of red is visceral – communicating fear, anxiety, vulnerability and danger – but also of rage, and passion. ‘red is an affirmation at any cost –  of contradiction, of aggression... symbolic of the intensity of the emotions involved’ 

I have experimented using my own mono-printed paper (that already had an underlying set of marks) primarily in black/white/blue/red drawing doodles and Personages (as if in a family portrait) spirals (in Biro) and repeat designs (waves/pulse).
I drew these accompanied by music which helped with the meditative quality of the process of creating - in particular the rhythmical quality of line/mark making - as if tracing my own memories or inner thoughts onto the paper. The colours became poignant because the palette was limited and because of an underlying meaning to me of those colours  - which started to emerge. Bourgeois said: “Colour is stronger than language. It’s a subliminal communication.” I hope to explore colour particularly how it speaks to and of me as I continue my journey holding onto the following thought (again by Bourgeois)

 'Art is restoration: the idea is to repair the damages that are inflicted in life, to make something that is fragmented - which is what fear and anxiety do to a person - into something whole'. 

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Ivilina Kouneva

Website: https://linktr.ee/ivilinakouneva  Instagram account: @ikoun

Bio

Ivilina Kouneva is a Bulgarian born visual artist who lives and works in the South East of England. She studied painting and she was trained and worked as a Fine Arts teacher. Ivilina Kouneva has been exploring the versatility of colour on canvas and paper for decades. Her work was featured in group exhibitions at Surface Gallery, Artcore UK, No Format gallery, Hundred Years Gallery, and with Sweet’Art, London among others. Kouneva has initiated more than 10 solo and two-person exhibitions in the past two decades.
In her work she is interested in blurring the edges between the stories, making referrals to different realities, books and images of Art.
Recently Kouneva has contributed to the Climate Cultures platform with the article “Unfolding Stories from the Anthropocene and beyond” (2021), as well as to the first edition of Rebel Zine, with an interview and an artwork (2021). Her texts and work were published in two artists initiated books: Women: Inspiring quotes&artistic responses (2020) and Quotes: inspirational quotations creative responses.
For her projects, she draws on previous experience of international art programmes such as: a residency at Hastings College (2015); A commission for REME Museum of Technology, part of “New Grounds” (2014). funded collaborations with Swiss artists (2011-12); a cultural development apprenticeship sponsored by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2004). 

Description

To Colours with Love: Green is a text where the artist draws on her personal experience of working professionally with colours for decades. It also reflects on events, literature and art, themed around colours. The main focus is on the green, suggested to have been the artist's most loved colour.

The two images show use of colours where plants interweave and transform into human female forms.

1.I will let you go – acrylic, drawing on mixed media joined paper cut outs, 115×80 cm., 2021
(From Circle of Life series )

2. Leda as I remember her II– acrylic, drawing, collage on joined mixed media paper cuts, 117×85,
2021, (Series Circle of Life)

To Colours wit Love:  Green

 At my last birthday party, I found out that my favourite colour is green. To my surprise, the invited women friends, all of them pretty important at different stages of my life, agreed and confirmed. I simply didn’t know that. They all came with presents in different shades of green. “Why?” I asked, “Because this is your colour, darling, didn’t you know that?” No, I didn’t..  One of my mentors in the art university used to say that green was good only in salads. Noteworthy to say his still life artworks didn’t lack the emerald colour.

 I am a visual artist, a painter. Even when my creations lean towards 3 dimensional, they are still rooted in painting and my nearly obsessive juggling with colours. Favourite colour? How could you choose among the mesmerising endless variety of hues, shades and tones? For me, even more important, how do you achieve their brilliance? Is it as simple as, let’s say, adding black to red and you will get a darker shade? Is it as boring and fragmentary as mixing any colour with grey to achieve tone? I know about a useful exercise of drawing equal circles and then filling them with mixed proportions of white and black to get everything in the palette between off white and deep granite grey.. Then add another colour, a few drops of any. Increasing the added quantity the greys will gradually turn into different hues of brown, green, violet, depending on the colour you mix it with.

Green isn’t one of the subtractive primary colours-red, blue and yellow. However, it comes to our minds is essential. This is the colour that we mostly associate with nature and our environment. In our collective visual memory green is crowned as the colour of biological survival, growth, rebirth. One may say its shades and hues depending on the mixed proportions of blue and yellow. This is a textbook true. But, what an endless variety of yellows and blues to choose from? When making your own perfect green, which shade of yellow to pick -one of ripe fields of wheat in the summer, or the buttery bright yellow of a tulip? Blue? Associated with the sea, also a challenge, changeable, never the same. 

 I am a painter and I am passionate about colours. Sounds like an addiction. Maybe, but a beautiful and inspirational one. Seen as simple and linear our daily routines may suddenly become complex and multilayered, with unexpected shifts and unpredictable situations. Colours somehow reflect Life patterns. As well as its ongoing change. Let's take the loaded with symbols and stunningly beautiful Rainbow. For me, this is one of the most surreal natural phenomenons. Have you ever tried to paint the rainbow? A grand seven coloured magic over the misty sea, where borders between tones are blurred and hued?

It would be simpler if it was only about adding, stirring and mixing proportions of colours. Coordinating colours is not a fashion priority. If one states yellow is warm they will be partly right. Go to an art gallery where great masters of colour are on display. Look at the few still life canvases of Matisse in Glasgow’s Kelvingrove, or, Francis Bacon’s disturbing and painfully beautiful works in Tate Britain. A citrus lemon next to the rich orange shade of brown “sounds” cooler than you would expect. Fragile pink of human flesh looks cold next to rusty warm red of blood. Balancing a colour palette in a painting is an evoking process that requires commitment and being entirely in the moment. It is like being in love.

 Colour Green. In his philosophical poem  “Community” the leading metaphysical poet of the late 16th and early 17th century, John Donne says: “Good is as visible as green”. The quote shines on an immaculate shade of earthy green coloured page in the recent Stephen Ellcock’s Book of Change“ Images to inspire Revelations and revaluations”.A beautiful way to introduce the theme of nature and natural.

To Green with Love.

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COLOUR BY - Stephen Nicholas

It's hard knowing how the world felt. Going from silent in monochrome to talkie and then on to glorious Technicolor. Having garish images beamed onto their retinas. Did anyone feel as though they'd lost anything in the process? I love the modern film 'Pleasantville' which takes this switch and subverts. A black and white society of the homemaker being threatened by anything from kisses on lovers lane, to jazz and modern literature. For each 'sin' a new colour. It's a film about the birth of youth culture. It's also an allegory about racial segregation and conservatism. About those who will break down barriers. How that can come from refusing to give up your seat or simply by existing. Through banner, slogan or mark on the wall. Through realising there is much more than red, white and blue.

If I'm honest my colours come in two forms: season and contrast.  From verdant new shoots to the red, amber and gold of autumn. But along the way, that palette gets muddied. In autumn we remember the wars. The period red blood of the battlefield, poppy or sweetheart's lips. As an artist, I look to focus on what surrounds me as a gauge of each passing day. How this goes from a concrete grey wall with sprayed tag. Disorder, isolation and erosion. To the intoxicating green when I walk to the outskirts. Now though that green seems to be marked with clear opaque plastic and red of discarded jumper. It makes me wonder: why are our lives so transient? What brought us here and where are we going? Who went before us? Why can we not house everyone? Why does red symbolise both danger and love?

Most of my art and words come through walking. In being unpredictable and carefree. My colours come through desire and messing around. I was asked by an artist friend if I'd accompany her one night around our hometown because she didn't feel safe going on her own. I only have so much space but it's sad she would feel that fear. Is that why male and female eyes see different things? I wanted to get away from this idea of the dark industrial north in the photos I took. We are no longer of Lowry factory spill. We are vibrant and youthful. We are of buzzing neon sign, blurred ambulance and insomnia. We are of tattooed skin, dyed hair and garments that show we belong. We are of tribal colours.

I'm not sure if my colours will eventually fade. If I will prefer different colours as I get older. Or if there'll be days where colours will jar. When colours will be like sunlight to vampires; cause me to recoil and hiss. I don't fear this revulsion. To focus for a moment; I know these images are abstract. They don't show reality as such but is that what a photograph should always do? However, they do record a split second on our walk. A view of an indefinable place fed through a prism of movement and saturation. Somewhat alien I guess. For me, it is never about what I see but more what I feel. Possibility and not stasis. Colours appear out of nowhere and then disappear. This earthbound place looks like some lost constellation.

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