There is a question that has accompanied my work from the very beginning: what does the eye truly see — and how does it listen — when it rests on a colour?
It is not a technical question. It is a question about attention — about that quality of presence which distinguishes seeing from merely looking. And it is from this threshold that Goethe’s colour theory keeps speaking to me, year after year, with an undiminished freshness.
Goethe was not looking for a classification. He was looking for a living phenomenon. In his Zur Farbenlehre he reveals a realm played out between light and darkness, where yellow and blue are the first movements — advancing and withdrawing, warmth and distance, expansion and receptivity. A knowledge born from direct observation, not from measurement.
Rudolf Steiner deepened Goethe’s colour theory in the light of spiritual science, bringing it even closer to my own sensibility. According to Steiner, colour is neither subjective nor purely objective: it embodies an objectivity accessible only through genuine inner listening. Colour reveals its nature when we stop analysing it and begin to receive it.
That is what I seek every time I approach the canvas.
The colour circle as a map of listening
Goethe arranges colours in a circle of six segments — Yellow, Orange, Red-Violet, Violet, Blue, Green — and observes their relationships as if they were conversations. Not rules. Conversations.
When the eye rests on a colour, the retina spontaneously activates the perception of its complementary. Red-violet calls for green. Yellow calls for violet. Blue calls for orange. This is not convention — it is physiology, and it is also poetry.
From this observation, three kinds of colour relationship emerge:
Harmonic pairs — they face each other across the circle, completing one another:
- Red-violet / Green
- Yellow / Violet
- Orange / Blue
Characteristic pairs — one colour apart, they create a live tension, resonating without fully satisfying:
- Violet / Blue
- Purple / Green
- Blue / Yellow
- Green / Orange
- Orange / Violet
Monotone pairs — adjacent in the circle, they lack breath between them:
- Blue / Green
- Green / Yellow
- and so on
In my painting practice I do not apply these relationships as formulas. I use them as a starting point for listening — to understand where a colour wants to go, and where it contracts.
Painting as contemplative practice
In my work, theory does not precede practice: it moves through it. When I paint in front of an audience — in a performance, in a shared space — colour moves in response to music, to light, to the presence of people in the room. There is no space for calculation. Only for reception.
It is there that Goethe’s colour theory and Steiner’s thinking cease to be theory and become body. The colour circle becomes breath.
This is the root of my painting. Not harmony as aesthetic outcome, but colour harmony as a process of listening — to oneself, to the space, to the light of the moment.
