‘I love the colours in this one.’

I’ve heard this before, as someone looks at a piece of my art. I know the feeling myself. My breath catches: What have I created? Or what has created itself, under my hands?

We identify with colour in different ways – we feel an affinity with one more than another. We associate feelings and experiences with colour, in both positive and negative ways. Context matters. What we choose for our living room won’t necessarily be the same as the colours we choose to wear, or those we appreciate in nature.

We notice which colours ‘go’ together. We find warmth and coolness, calm and vigour, in the various colours in the spectrum of life.

For an artist, colour is one tool among many. I love the complementary nature of texture and colour, medium and style – the way each artist makes their unique mark.

As I have explored colour in my own creative journey, I have embraced a playful, pseudo-abstract style rather than precise detail. In doing so, I have let go of old frustrations of not having the patience for detailed realism and instead looked to find my own voice, not someone else’s. The subconscious shift, whereby I gave myself permission to play, has been liberating.

Along with texture and tangibility, colour and light form a big part of this: hues, shades, tones, lightness and darkness, saturation, blending, superimposing – developing understanding of medium and technique through the practice of play.

I have found that colour is a profound means of expression – sometimes by deliberately using specific colour, but often just ‘seeing what happens’ with the colours at my fingertips. It becomes part of an artwork’s personality. Vibrant colours are intrinsic to my style, my unique voice. I speak, at least in part, through colour.

There was a time in my life where I was exploring the symbols of beginning and ending that I found in red skies and rainbows. That carried into my art and rippled outwards. I emerged, blinking, into a new day full of clamouring colours. I had to spend time adjusting to the vivid light, intermittently close my eyes and let the warmth strengthen me, as a butterfly needs sunlight to power its first flight.

I began to discover who I was.

It was, I admit, rather unnerving. Initially when we are given the freedom to colour outside the lines – literally or metaphorically – we can distrust ourselves. But guidelines and structures that were helpful in the past can turn into straitjackets, ill-fitting moulds in which we feel cramped and confused as to who we truly are.

The visual – especially colour and light – chimes with the wildness in my soul, a wildness I am beginning to welcome, not fear.

Faith roars within me (though I can no longer reduce it to doctrine or dogma and it wriggles away if I care to try). I have found myself paddling in a divine palette of grace, feeling a sense of soul-welcome, a decluttering of the spirit. I coloured ‘inside the lines’ for years. Now I am daring to be freer.

A picture has depth and interest by having various intensities, contrast, tender tones side by side with stronger shades.

The butterfly can no longer speak the language of the caterpillar – it is too clunky; the horizon is so much broader now.

Some liberty has found me – some profound sense that I don’t have to know or understand everything and yet, in that recognition, some part of me feels a deeper understanding of everything. The old me would raise her eyebrows and think this rather wishy-washy, even worrying (while hiding a tint of envy in the colour of her eyes). Let her. I’m not filtered, not muted, anymore. In that blast of colour, that walking into the new day, it no longer matters.

Out here lies holy ground. I have never felt more inclined to take off my shoes.

This is an abridged version of an article that appeared in magnet magazine in 2022