Why We Rarely Remember Colours
There is one question I find myself returning to every time I begin a new painting.
Most of us can remember the people who shaped our lives. We remember conversations that changed us, places we loved, the sound of a familiar voice, even the scent of a particular season. But ask someone what colour the world was on one of the most important days of their life, and the answer rarely comes easily. We seldom remember the light that filled the room, the exact blue of the morning sky, or the quiet warmth reflected from a wall at sunset. We spend our lives surrounded by colour, yet we almost never think to remember it.
And still, colour has an extraordinary ability to bring us home.
Sometimes a single unexpected shade is enough to awaken a memory that has been silent for decades. Before we can explain why, we are already somewhere else. We remember the feeling before we remember the story. The air. The silence. The sense of being completely present in a moment that seemed ordinary at the time but somehow stayed with us.
The longer I paint, the less I believe that colour is simply something we see. I have come to think of it as one of the quietest forms of memory we possess. We rarely store it consciously, yet it often becomes the thread that leads us back to places we thought were lost forever. Not back to facts or events, but back to the way life once felt.
Perhaps this is why finding the right colour can take longer than painting the picture itself. I am rarely searching for a perfect blue or a flawless green. Those are only pigments. What I am really searching for is a colour that carries a particular atmosphere - a colour that might one day awaken something deeply familiar in another person, even if they cannot explain why.
The paintings that stay with us for years rarely do so because they are technically perfect. They remain because they continue to hold something fragile that most images lose with time. They preserve a state of mind, a quality of light, a feeling that cannot be reduced to words. We return to them not because they never change, but because we do.
Sometimes I think this is the real work of a painter. Not simply to record what the world looked like, but to preserve what it felt like to be alive within it. To hold on to a fleeting light before it disappears, to notice a colour before it slips unnoticed into memory, and to give that experience a form that can remain long after the moment itself has passed.
Perhaps this is why painting still matters in a world overflowing with images. A photograph can remind us of what we saw. A painting, at its very best, can remind us of what we once felt. And sometimes, without us even realising it, that feeling becomes part of the life we choose to live with.
