The Bar

"Paint is just the bait. Light is the fish."

Colour isn't really in anything. A lemon swallows most of the light that hits it and bounces back the yellow bit. Your eye catches that and your brain shouts "yellow". Colour is light, stuff and you, all at once. Change any one of them and the colour changes. That's why colour isn't simple, and why your eyes get a vote.

Your phone makes colour by adding light: red, green and blue. Red light plus green light makes yellow. All three at full make white. This is additive colour. More light, brighter.

Paint doesn't make light. It eats it. Each pigment swallows some of the white light and gives back the leftovers. Mix two paints and each one eats its share, so less comes back. This is subtractive colour. More mixing, darker and duller.

That's why a photo of a painting never looks right, and why the turquoise on your phone isn't in any tube. One is a lightbox, the other is a plate. Judge paint in the light it'll live in.

"Sometimes the sun drops behind a big gooey dark-blue cloud halfway through a session and the whole painting glazes over in front of you like the eyes of a tired dog."

Printers use cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK), subtractive like paint. Dyes dissolve and stain. Pigments are particles that sit. A peacock feather or a soap bubble has no pigment at all: tiny structures bend the light. That's structural colour.

Let me teach you the colour wheel, and then let me tell you why it lies.

Red, yellow, blue. Mix the blue with the red and you get purple. The yellow with the red and you get orange, more of a Venetian orange with the reds I use, but orange. The yellow with the blue and you get green. Simple as a nursery rhyme.

Now the fascinating bit: complementary colours. They sit on opposite sides of the wheel. What’s opposite green? Red. Green and red, the colours of Christmas. Opposite blue? Orange. Opposite yellow? Purple. Sports teams and logos pair these up all the time, purple and yellow, because they stand out and people love them. Once I tell you about them you’ll start spotting them all over the place.

That’s the science. Here’s the rebellion.

Some people approach colour as a science, and it feels yuck to me, because too often emotion completely contradicts the science about what actually looks good. Orange doesn’t go with blue. Yellow doesn’t go with purple. Mash them together and they look like soup. Disgusting combinations. And the notion that they “complement” each other? That’s where the science falls down.

Yes, I just taught you the rule and then kicked its legs out. Both are true. That’s colour. A wild horse that will eat from your hand one morning and kick the gate off its hinges the next.

My favourite book on colour is The Secret Lives of Colour. It tells the stories behind each colour. When it was discovered. Why it was so valuable at certain points in history. When it got democratised, cheap and available to everyone. Royal purple, ground up, expensive, only royals could afford it. Same with blues. Why Naples yellow is called Naples yellow. The point of that book is that it makes you less clinical about colour and more romantic about it. And once you’re romantic about colour, you make your own emotional decisions. That’s when your art becomes meaningful. Not because a wheel told you orange goes with blue.

Grass doesn’t always have to be green. Paint grass just green and it gets boring. It needs more of the rainbow in it. I’ll put yellow straight on top of green so it never stays perfect yellow; it splices in, goes a little bit mustardy, a little bit greeny, and in those early layers it adds warmth to the picture, that natural power coming back.

And whatever you do, don’t use just white for a cloud. Clouds are very rarely pure white. They look pure white against the rest of the world, but the cloud itself isn’t white. Look at a cloud right now. There’s grey in it. There’s probably red in it, a reddish grey. There’s blue, obviously, because the sky is blue. Pink might be playing a role. Explore the rest of the spectrum, or you just don’t get it.

Green, by the way, might be the best colour in nature and the hardest to capture. Like a diamond. Think of light shimmering off the sea. You can’t bottle the sea. If you could, it’d be a diamond.

People ask me: why not more realistic colours?

Here’s my answer. Take a photo of a face and turn the saturation on one colour all the way up. Random highlights of blue or orange or red start popping out of the skin. So was there no blue in the face? Or a little bit? Or should the whole face be blue?

The colour was always there. Hiding. A lot of the colour I put down gets covered up later, but it needs to be under there, in the underlying layers. There are pockets, flares of red in the environment. Even a red I’ve been bagging on all session, I’ll put in the underlayers, so when we get towards the end it pops out from underneath like an ember in the ashes when you blow on it.

Blue is like a predecessor to black. Get blue all over the surface and the painting only gets more fun.

And black. Black is a heavy hitter. Before any other colour, I’d talk about the damage black can do. Blue and red do amazing things, but nothing has the impact on a piece of artwork that black has. Sometimes even regular paint black doesn’t cut the mustard and you need an ink black, something that sits with incredible potency on the surface and just jumps out.

But be careful. Lay your blacks on thick, and if other colours touch them while they’re wet, those lovely pastel tones turn into shades of grey and black. Let the blacks dry. Then come back.

I’m a colour guy. If you want to go black and white, charcoal and pencils are your best friend, no smell, do them wherever you like. But if you’re going to use paint, use colour.

And look at your walls. A lot of our experience of colour doesn’t come from the world around us anymore. A lot of houses, and it breaks my heart, are white and black. That’s all they are. “I’m doing it up for resale.” “I don’t trust my own taste.” So you paint the walls white, and then you wonder why your eyes hurt and why you don’t feel good. Maybe you hang one little picture. In my mind, the only way to counteract that much white is a giant, crazy, full-colour painting on the wall that really jumps out. Then you get balance.

You paid the same for paint either way. You just opted for none.

Paint is just the bait. Light is the fish.

Every colour you put down is a promise that light will come along later and keep. Sometimes it does. Sometimes the sun drops behind a big gooey dark-blue cloud halfway through a session and the whole painting glazes over in front of you like the eyes of a tired dog.

What’s nice for painting is diffuse light. Light everywhere, but not one light source as such. Obviously the sun’s over there somewhere, but the clouds in front of it scatter the light around, soft as flour.

The best is in the morning, when clouds are covering the sun and the sun’s at about a thirty-degree angle. The light’s diffused. You can examine all the colours on the canvas at once. Strong direct light hitting a glossy surface does the opposite: it turns the painting to chrome and shines it back at you, and you lose the colour in the glare.

Usually I work from dark to light. Raw umber first, often, underlining all the colours we’ll find later. Then the light climbs out of the dark the way morning climbs out of a valley.

But rules are for breaking at seven in the morning. One sunrise at Lake Tarawera, with an amazing glaze on the lake and in the sky, I did the naughty thing and started with the lake and the sky. Light colours first, moving towards the dark. Completely different from what I normally do. The light was there. I wasn’t going to make it wait.

A painting with texture and mixed finishes is never the same painting twice.

I like mixing the finishes: not all gloss, not all satin, but a combination in different spots. Then, as the light moves, some areas lose their colour completely and reflect white like chrome, and others come alive. You don’t just see the colours shift their vibe. You lose colours and gain colours as the light changes. If you’ve got a room where you can change the hue of the lights, fire red light at a painting, then blue, then orange, and the whole vibe changes. Direct light versus indirect light gives different outcomes from satin and gloss.

Textures do the same thing. When the light catches them, they need to stand out as the light moves around. Late in the day, as the sun drops, the shadows in the thick paint grow and completely change how certain bits look. It’s a naughty little secret you only know about if you’re there in person with the work.

So when someone asks where to hang a portrait, I say: a room with a window, where the light changes over the day. That’s a massive plus for how a work activates in a space. Put it in a basement or a study with no natural light and it’ll be more controlled, but you’ll miss a trick. If you like to control your house, that’s fine too. Change which lamps you leave on, and you’ll see it differently each time.

The more of that you can put into a painting, the better it is long term. Because even Starry Night, you can only see so many hundreds of thousands of times before it’s run its course with you. But a painting that can be reimagined in different seasons, different times of day, different lighting, different angles and distances? That takes a long time, maybe forever, to finish getting to know. Suddenly you’ve got a companion in life, not a picture you thought was nice at a farmers market.

Some sessions end because the light just gives out. One evening stream I could hardly see the canvas by the end, and the replay still looked bright. Phones see better in the dark than we do now. Sometimes I’ve had to threaten to drag out a floodlight and beam it at the work.

You can’t keep the light. That’s the whole point of painting it.

Funny story. I’ve got a syndrome, and it’s called visual snow.

Everywhere I look, everything I see has a slight electrical static over it. A faint fizz of television snow laid across the gorge, across my daughter’s face, across the canvas. All day. Every day.

You could see that as a disaster. Is it? Monet had cataracts. Beethoven went deaf. Can’t see, can’t hear. On one hand the static could drive me wild. On the other hand, it’s not like that at all. Everything glitters for me.

I developed it about six years ago now. When it started, it came on all at once, and I felt like I’d never see colour or gradients again. Like someone had pulled a fine grey veil over the world and pinned it at the corners.

But funnily enough, it completely changed the way I made art. Everything I’ve ever made that’s been shown online, everything anyone has ever seen of mine, has been made since I’ve had visual snow.