Gallery Collection 74 - ‘Where Colours Argue’

‘Where Colours Argue’ is dense and contested. Thick slabs of paint are trowelled and squeezed onto the canvas like cake frosting form the base layer. Then aggressive orange, construction yellow, and metallic gold get forced on top. Some areas are airbrushed, soft and hazy. Others are piled an inch thick, casting real shadows. The gold blobs look like nuggets pressed into wet cement. Nothing blends. Every color fights for territory. The surface is a map of interruptions. You can see where one mark got covered by another, where the knife slipped, where a colour gave up and let something else take over.

This can also be seen as cognitive overload as landscape. The dark brown and grey are the executive function grid. The rules, the schedules, the demands to be coherent. The white is the mask. It is plastered on in thick, exhausting layers to make everything look acceptable. Then the orange hits. That is anger, urgency, or a sudden sensory spike. The yellow is joy or a special interest trying to push through, but it gets boxed in fast. The gold is value. It is the part of you that is precious, even when it looks messy. Those gold chunks are the bits of self-worth you refuse to sand down. This painting is not chaotic for the sake of it. It is what a brain looks like when it is running six processes at once while being told to sit still. It is the beauty and the cost of refusing to filter yourself into something flat.