Colour Charts

A few years ago I had a job to design some chairs for a furniture manufacturer and it was decided that these should be available in a painted finish. Therefore a range of colours had to be chosen. The manufacturer was very keen on using colours from the Farrow and Ball range, but I was very much against this as it would have given the chairs a country-house look, which was at odds with the design. We looked at other ranges of colours from other paint companies but this just made it seem like the choice of colour was being made second-hand: after all, these groups of colours had been chosen by someone else.

I was living near Winterbourne Botanical Garden (which is part of Birmingham University) so, remembering Ruskin's advice to look to nature, I started taking photographs of plants and flowers in the gardens. I was thinking : if you were doing a painting of this which would be the main colours?
From the photographs at Winterbourne, checking as far as I could that the colours were accurate, I mixed sets of colours in artists' oil paint. This is more difficult than you might think because at every stage there is room for error and compromises have to be made. Whenever you observe something it changes. I took the most interesting part from each photograph and from an archival print I identified six colours from each image to create a natural colour palette for that image. Then, thinking it would be useful to translate these colours into household paint that could be used in product design or interiors, I found I could match many of the colours with the Dulux Trade Colour Palette which gives each colour a standard reference number.

The immediate outcome of this project was an exhibition in the gallery at Winterbourne Botanical Gardens, but perhaps more importantly I have used these colour combinations in many other works since.