PAINTING

“Some words are for imagining. Colour words, for instance. Blue's not one of them—not when it's flat straight. But even blue can get complicated and run in all directions, like night beetles tipped from a jar. Blue could be prushan, seraleen, colbult, sian, ultramreen, ayzure, turkwoyse, Pa said.”

So begins Guinevere Glasfurd Brown’s short story The Word for It, written in response to my 2015 exhibition Surface Detail. Her playful, evocative use of colour language inspired a series of paintings under the same name, in which I explored the subtle shifts within the so-called “flat straight” of red, blue, green, and other chromatic absolutes. Using thin layers of oil paint, I worked to expose the complexity and instability of even the most familiar hues.

While The Word for It series was directly shaped by Guinevere’s story, I feel that the challenge she posed—of giving form to the elusive nature of colour—found its most resonant expression in my later and ongoing Noise and After Image series.