Gillian Lever

The brilliance of colour

2024 has started joyfully working on a series of new oil canvases in the studio. I have been loving the emerging colours of Spring in the garden and on local walks and have also been enjoying studying Vuillard’s enigmatic use of colour and light. Earlier in the year we visited the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille where I was captivated by his ‘Still Life with a bouquet of roses.’

Winifred Nicholson is another artist who I find truly inspirational in relation to colour - her writing, as well as her painting, is so vibrant.

”Each colour is unique, but no colour can stand alone. To get the full value of its unique colour it must have other hues by its side, not for mere contrast, as black, say, contrasts with white, or square with circle, but prismatically to break up the rays of colour, as a shuttlecock is tossed, to and from the waves of light. Thus all the most brilliant things of nature are composed of tiny facets or mirrors which re-reflect each other - a kingfisher’s breast, jay’s feather, butterfly’s wing, fish’s scales, flower petals in all their transparency - each may appear one hue, but in reality under a microscope are made up of many varied hues in true harmony, heightening each other’s brilliance. So we cull our colours here and there, up and down the scale to create the particular colour we have in mind.”

Winifred Nicholson

Later in 2024 Jake and I are planning an Open Studios event here in Birmingham - a focus for my harmonic experiments.