Blue is a colour that resonates with me. I love it. I love other colours too, red would be one, but blue is one of those versatile colours that you can incorporate in any kind of design with most colours and it will just work. It’s a calming colour, I even painted some of the walls of the house blue! There is a lot of varnished wood in this home, which I am not a particular fan of, and I needed something to calm all the effect of the wood down so it didn’t suffocate. The colour blue was the perfect solution, which is the opposite of orange on the colour spectrum. The result is it neutralised a lot of the effect the wood was having when you walked into the house.

Blue is described in the Oxford dictionary as the “pure colour of a clear sky; the primary colour between green and violet in the visible spectrum, an effect of light with a wavelength between 450 and 500 nm.” For me blue is so much more than that, and lately it has been making a prominent appearance in my art work.

It started last year in particular when I found myself painting apricots (orange) with blue tableware…

Delft apricots
Acrylic on canvas
20 X 30 cm

Clearly the orange-ish wood and blue walls were playing on my subconscious and it found its way to the surface in the form of delft apricots. 🙂 I am particularly pleased with how the little butter knife came out with the impression of the blue design on the handle of the knife, and the reflected light from the apricots in the blade.

A very simple little still life but a very powerful illustration of how well blue and orange work together.

This caught my eye the other day and I thought I would paint it. The moist brilliance of the orange flesh against the deep blue Spode plate excited me. There is that blue and orange combination again that just works so well! The last while I have been working with a palette knife on very textural works, but every now and again I like to remind myself how to use a paint brush.