Colour Theory According to Me

How a woman who wears black ended up painting in colour.

I have a strange relationship with colour.

My house is full of pastels – mainly pale greens, creams, black and a hint of pink. I can't stand red, orange or yellow in my home. I like things to be subtle and understated.

When it comes to me, I dress almost entirely in black. Even on a recent holiday to Crete I reached for a pair of black wide-leg trousers and a black T-shirt nearly every day. If I add a bit of "colour", it's usually beige or a floral kimono which is, you've guessed it, mainly black.

Recently I've been wondering why this is, and also why the only actual colour I usually allow myself to wear is pink.

I think there are a few reasons for the black. Firstly, I genuinely like it and I think I look quite good in it. It doesn't drain my complexion the way people often say it should, and if it happens to make me look a tiny bit smaller than I actually am, that's an added bonus.

But I think there's something else behind it.

Black allows me to stand out and disappear at the same time. It makes me feel put together without asking for attention. I don't have to think about whether my underwear is showing through, whether things match or whether I've made the wrong choice. Black feels safe.

The pink is a bit more complicated.

When I was a baby we didn't have much money and I only had one dress, which my mum washed and dried overnight. My dad bought it for me on a work trip and, you've guessed it, it was pink. Even though I only wore it for a short time, I still have it all these years later.

My dad loved me in pink.

I was always a girly girl, even though I spend most of my life in trousers these days. I got married in pink rather than white. There are touches of pink throughout my house. The dress I was wearing the last time my dad saw me was black with pink flowers and he told me, as he always did, that I looked lovely in pink.

I wore that same dress to his funeral a few weeks later.

I also have the dressing gown I bought for my mum because she liked it but then forgot she owned it and never wore it. I wear it all the time.

Somewhere along the way, pink stopped being just a colour. For me, it became synonymous with love.

Where my relationship with colour becomes even stranger is that I'm an artist who paints in bright, vibrant colours.

If you've read some of my previous articles you'll know that those colours appeared during one of the darkest periods of my life, around the time my dad died. There were other things happening too that I'd rather keep private, but it was a time that completely knocked me sideways.

Then something unexpected happened.

My paintings exploded with colour.

Pinks. Mauves. Jade.

Colours I'd never really painted with before simply arrived and refused to leave. I didn't choose them. If anything, they chose me. They forced their way onto the canvas and have stayed ever since, becoming almost my signature colours.

Maybe I wasn’t ready to wear colour, but I was ready to paint it.

I still don't wear much colour, although I did buy a fuchsia pink T-shirt a few weeks ago.

I picked it up.

Put it back.

Carried on shopping.

An hour later I found myself back in the shop holding it again. I looked at myself in the mirror and realised how much it lit up my face.

I put it back.

Walked around for another ten minutes.

Then I went back, grabbed it and paid for it before I could talk myself out of it.

The first time I wore it felt strangely uncomfortable. It was as though I'd gone from one extreme to the other and suddenly people noticed I was wearing something different.

Maybe that's the thing about colour.

Sometimes the parts of ourselves we try hardest to keep hidden find a way of showing up anyway.

Mine appeared first in my paintings.

Now, every now and then, it appears in a ridiculously bright pink T-shirt.

It still feels a little daring.

But it turns out it goes surprisingly well with black trousers.