People ask me about my use of color more than anything else. How do you choose what colors to place next to each other? Do you plan it in advance? Is it intuitive or systematic?
The answer is both and neither. Color relationships work beneath conscious decision-making, in the space where physics, psychology, and personal emotional association intersect.
Color as Content, Not Decoration
Most people think of color as aesthetic choice—something that makes a painting prettier or more appealing. In my work, color is content. It's what the painting is actually communicating.
When I place a saturated yellow next to a deep blue, I'm not making a pretty combination. I'm creating a relationship that has visual, emotional, and conceptual consequences. That yellow will advance. That blue will recede. Together they'll create visual vibration. The eye will struggle to focus because the colors are optically competing.
That vibration isn't accident. It's communication. It says something about instability, about tension, about forces in opposition.
The Physics of Color
Color isn't a property of objects. It's a relationship between light wavelengths, the material properties of surfaces, and the human visual system. Understanding this physics fundamentally changed how I approach color in my work.
When light hits a surface, some wavelengths are absorbed, others are reflected. Your eye receives the reflected light and sends information to your brain, which constructs the experience of color. It's not the object that's colored—it's the light bouncing off it that creates color perception.
This is precisely what fascinates me about refraction. White light contains all wavelengths equally balanced. When light refracts, it separates into component colors. The prism reveals what was always there but invisible—the spectrum hidden within apparent white light.
Personal Color Language
Beyond color theory, every artist develops a personal vocabulary. Colors that feel true to their emotional experience, their creative vision, their way of understanding the world.
Through years of work, I've learned my own color preferences and what they communicate:
- Deep blues suggest presence, depth, containment.
- Saturated magentas express urgency and emotion.
- Metallics suggest transition, the moment where one state becomes another.
- Reds in combination with yellows create the visual vibration of transformation.
- Whites and soft neutrals create space for the eye to rest.
I didn't choose these associations. They emerged through years of practice, through noticing what colors felt true when I was trying to communicate specific ideas or feelings.
Chromatic Flattening: Integrating Theory with Practice
My chromatic flattening technique integrates color theory with material experimentation. I'm not just thinking about color relationships—I'm enacting them through how acrylics interact when poured, how colors coalesce and merge, how saturation shifts as layers accumulate.
The technique allows saturated colors to maintain intensity while also merging and creating visual depth. It honors the physics of color while creating the optical effects I'm after.
Color and Meaning
I'm deeply interested in how color carries cultural meaning. Blue suggests sadness in some traditions, coolness or spirituality in others. Red means danger or passion or luck depending on cultural context.
I don't try to control these associations. Instead, I trust that viewers bring their own color associations to my work. That someone responding to a particular color combination might be responding to personal memory, cultural association, or pure optical reaction—and all three are valid.
My role isn't to enforce meaning through color. It's to create color relationships rich enough that viewers can find their own meanings in them.