I keep a colour journal. Not a sketchbook — just colours. Swatches of paint, fabric samples, screenshots of screens, torn pages from magazines. Each one annotated with a date and sometimes a word. Sometimes no word at all.
I started this practice because I noticed that my emotional life arrives in colour before it arrives in language. Before I have a name for something I am feeling, I have already reached for a particular tube of paint. The reaching is the knowing.
Before I had words for what I was feeling, I had colour. Ochre for homesickness. Deep indigo for a grief that had not yet found its shape.
Ochre appears frequently in my work. It is a warm, ancient pigment — found in cave paintings, in earth, in skin. For me it carries something specific: the warmth of late afternoon light in a place I am always slightly trying to return to. When I mix it now, I feel that particular quality of longing.
This is not arbitrary. Colour science tells us that our responses to colour are partly cultural, partly evolutionary, partly deeply personal. The cultural layer is the most visible — white for mourning in some traditions, for celebration in others. But beneath that is the personal stratum, laid down through specific memory and experience, that is yours alone.
I am interested in the conversation between these layers. When I use deep indigo in a portrait, I am drawing on the cultural resonance of that colour — authority, depth, night, mystery — and also on my own private library of associations. The viewer brings their own. A painting becomes a site of overlapping colour vocabularies, each one translating differently.
Learning to use colour intentionally — rather than decoratively — took years. It required paying attention not just to what colours look like together but to what they do. How they push and pull. How a warm colour in a cold composition changes the emotional temperature of everything around it. How the same blue reads differently depending on what it is next to, what light it is under, what the viewer brought into the room with them.
Colour is never neutral. It is always saying something. My job is to make sure I know what I am saying before I say it.
