Can colour paint the feeling of summer?

What happens when you stop painting what you see?

I've been experimenting with the use of colour in my painting for a while and whilst I love the muted calm colours of winter, it is as the heat of summer has led my painting that I have made some real progress with colour.

I've also understood something very interesting about my paintings.

I used to try and paint what I saw and this often left me a little disappointed that it didn't seem to say much about how I felt experiencing a place or capture the fleeting moments.

Lately I have been experimenting with brighter, warmer colours and wondering if colour could represent the heat of summer?

I think it works in these paintings. It has been very hot during the UK heatwave. These paintings are about heat and also about the long daylight hours and the joyfulness of summer days. The colours absolutely speak to that.

Softer, more subtle colours describe the calm of a hazy summer day with colours that I could not observe in the landscape.

Through these paintings I realised that I am interested in showing invisible subjects such as summer heat or wind and in the feelings they evoke.

In deliberately choosing colour, these paintings could be about colour but they are not really. They are about prioritising the invisible subjects and trying to show what cannot be painted directly without loosing the visible subject to complete abstraction.

Colour is an excellent proxy for invisible subjects. There are others such as brushstrokes, edges or texture.

For me, any proxy must work in service of the underlying mood of the painting which is where the invisible subjects hide.

I wonder how far I can take this before I loose the subject completely to abstraction and if that loss would even matter?

As I sit writing with a breeze blowing through the window, I also wonder if colour can describe a joyful heat of long summer day, the what might describe the wind and how it feels?

Until the next time, happy wondering.

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