Alchemy at the easel

“Oh Edmund can it be true, that I hold here in my mortal hand, a nugget of purest green” Lord Percy exclaimed excitedly while holding what looks like a solid lump of snot. 

It’s even funnier when you remember he was trying to alchemise gold. Blackadder’s response to call him an utter berk was probably the right one, but I get it, though. Because I, too, have ‘invented green’.

Everyone knows blue and yellow make green, right? Primary school stuff. But what I didn’t know is that yellow with a touch of black doesn’t make a darker yellow. It makes the most luscious olive green.

Of course I found out by accident. I’m no mixologist when it comes to colour. I even bought a book of colour-mixing recipes that remains unopened. I’m sure I’ll dive into it at some point. For now, a large part of my process involves the same colours reappearing across different paintings and, intentional or not, it creates a kind of adhesion: a recognisable visual language.

But I wanted to darken yellow.

I knew red would shove it towards orange, and I genuinely thought black would just dull it a bit. It didn’t. And after my initial ‘oh shit, I didn’t mean to do that’ moment… I watched the two colours combine and thought…oooh now that’s my kind of green.

I’ve got viridian, sap green, probably a half-squeezed tube of phthalo green somewhere too. And don’t get me wrong, they’re great. Green is my most favourit-ist colour ever,  in the whole wide world. But those greens can be cold, slightly shrill. This olive green is warm and buttery, and it feels like it’s of the earth.

It first appeared in Wide Awake as the girl’s jumper. Then again in If Wishes Were Horses. In Olive Café it was basically made for the walls of that Hopper-esque room. It came back in The Rebirth of Ophelia, in the girl’s dress and the lily pads, with colder greens creeping in as part of the dark water… but it didn’t stop there.

In Inner Wild it returned as the clothing of the male figure. In two iterations of the Edenic series it snuck into the background. An unstoppable force of… nature, I guess. That’s what it felt like again when I used it for The Watcher (affectionately known as Stagman) and it turned up as his hoodie.

But why this green?

Accidentally finding it is one thing, but feeling it move across paintings is another. It wasn’t some conscious strategy, like… ‘this is a body of work, let one colour stitch it together’ kind of thing.  I already have the red thread doing that.

I’m not going to lie though, I’m a bit obsessed with it now. In the piece I’m currently working on, I can feel the clothing wanting to carry a lighter version of it too. And if we want to flirt with symbolism, green is the colour of the heart chakra… apparently. Which, honestly, feels appropriate given the undercurrent of this whole series.

So while Lord Percy might’ve been disappointed to create green instead of gold, I’m delighted...I’ll take green over gold any day.