The Power of Colour

In Western culture, the colour red is inextricably linked to martyrdom – from the sacrificial blood of Christ symbolised by the red wine of the Eucharist to the vivid scarlet petticoat worn by Mary the Queen of Scots during her execution in 1587. Cummins employs the motif of a red poppy to expand the idea of sacrifice and renewal in his monumental sculptural programmes. The cascading poppies featured in the Summer Exhibition echo Cummins' previous installations; yet in scale and setting, the work takes on a new meaning. Although still monumental, their domestic setting highlights the intricate and sculptural quality of the work, captivating the viewer’s attention. 

In the history of art, the earliest pigments were extracted from the minerals and stones of the earth. Many of the earliest artworks such as early cave drawings from the Palaeolithic period over 300,000 years ago were executed in the earthy browns and reds of ochre – a pigment deriving from hematite, also known as iron oxide. Along a similar vein, Cummins often uses natural pigments in his floral works on paper. Hand-grinding the petals of flowers – typically hydrangeas and cornflowers – he produces solutions which he then uses to paint his floral studies, reminiscent of George O’Keeffe’s magnified, large-scale flowers. Embracing a millennia-old tradition, Cummins’ practice marks a return to the earth. In this sense, his art embodies the alchemy of material transformation and spiritual renewal, much like the poppies which grew over the graves of the fallen soldiers in Flanders Field. In Cummins’ oeuvre, red delivers message of hope but also of warning – the inescapable reminder of bloodshed and the horrors of war. The red poppy delivers a message which cannot be ignored: ‘Lest we forget.’

‘Hockney employed the swimming pool as a symbol of ‘the good life,’ the search for paradise in elite hideaways; the allure of sensuality, beauty, and leisure; and, above all, a chance to play with light and colour.’ 1

In many ways, blue is a paradoxical colour: often read as calmness and serenity, it can also be tinged with melancholy. The phrase ‘feeling blue’ can be traced back to the 1300s, with Geoffrey Chaucer being the first documented author to use the colour to describe sadness in his poem The Complaint of Mars. In the history of art, Picasso’s Blue Period (1901- 1904) perhaps best encapsulates this emotion. Characterised by sombre paintings executed in a blue palette, this was a time of profound grief following the death of his friend, Carles Casagemas. However, subsequent artists have revised this association of the colour blue with despair. For instance, in his iconic swimming pool paintings, David Hockney transforms the colour into a pure expression of joy.

Hockney’s pools are some of the most memorable images in his oeuvre. The intense swimming-pool blue of his paintings and prints has come to symbolise the exuberance and sense of freedom associated with Los Angeles in the 60s and 70s. Hockney’s California became synonymous with bright and playful swimming pool scenes – these striking cerulean rectangles acting as site of escapism, reflecting the excitement the young artist felt upon moving to the West Coast. As Hockney recalls: ‘I remember flying in on an afternoon, and as we flew in over Los Angeles I looked down to see blue swimming pools all over, and I realised that a swimming pool in England would have been a luxury, whereas here they are not.’

In the history of art, blue is often used to depict the celestial realm, representing something heavenly and just out of reach. This can be seen in the serene blue of Michelangelo’s Frescos in the Sistine Chapel (1508 – 1512) or the utopian haven represented in Matisse’s Polynesia, the Sea (1946). For early 20th century artists, blue could also be the colour of dreams and memory – as seen in Chagall’s ethereal visions of his childhood and Joan Miró’s abstract Photo: This is the Colour of my Dreams (1925). In his depictions of Los Angeles, Hockney harnesses this association of blue with otherworldliness – his azure pools reflecting cloudless skies capture the dreamy headiness of the city. The mesmerising effect of light dancing on the surface of a pool is heightened through the rippling blue lines of his lithographic works such as Pool made with Paper and Blue Ink for Book (1980).

Hockney presents an idealised view of Los Angeles, with the swimming pool being the ultimate symbol of hedonism and luxury. Pools act as a metaphor for liberation and the breaking of social norms, visually signified by the rupture of the water’s still surface in Hockney’s works featuring a ‘splash’. When Hockney moved to Los Angeles, he was struck by the array of colours as well as how the natural sunlight made everything look brighter. ‘California always affected me with colour,’ he noted; ‘Because of the light you see more colour, people wear more colourful clothes, you notice it, it doesn’t look garish: there is more colour in life here.’ The sun-drenched affluence of the West Coast was a far cry from Hockney’s hometown of Bradford. This experience informed his oeuvre, injecting subsequent landscapes with vibrant hues.

The cerulean which Hockney uses in his paintings and lithographs is a recent phenomenon; a synthesised blue pigment which only became popular in the late 1800s by producing a compound of cobalt and tin oxide. Previously, artists had historically used natural pigments such as ultramarine, made from the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli (which was, at one point, more expensive than gold). In contrast, Hockney’s acrylic blue paints and lithographic inks speak the language of modernity, cementing the swimming pool as a symbol of modern leisure.

In Pedro Paricio’s most recent Hockney-inspired pool paintings, he employs various shades of blue to denote movement and the effect of light on the water’s surface. In Pool (2025), Paricio dives headfirst into Hockney’s iconic motif: achieving the effect of glistening light on water with metallic blue paint and precisely rendered ripple effects on the surface. Luminous blue reflections dance across the water in Hockney fashion, their fluidity standing in contrast to the rigid, flat blocks of colour found throughout the canvas. In Pool with Stairs (2025), Paricio adds his signature prismatic patterns to emulate the colours of refracted light. The precision of these paintings reflects Paricio’s concern with capturing water in motion. This reinterpretation of Hockney’s splashes using a restricted colour palette is a playful homage to the older artist. Hockney’s pools derived from his preoccupation with the ‘problem of painting water’, of depicting the transparent qualities of a swimming pool using a predominantly blue palette. Hockney articulates this challenge as follows: ‘In the swimming pool pictures, I had become interested in the more general problem of painting the water, finding a way to do it. It is an interesting formal problem, really, apart from its subject matter…every time you look at a pool, it is a different blue. And each time you see it, it takes on a different character.’ 

The mutability of water, with its perpetually changing forms and varying levels of transparency, became a graphic challenge for Hockney in his lithographic prints. Hockney uses a full spectrum of shades of blue to communicate variations in light or weather conditions, depicting pools a various times of day or seasons of the year.

The vivid colour palettes of Hockney and Paricio provide a vehicle for dynamic and invigorating compositions. Hockney once referred to the Mediterranean as a vast ‘blue hedonistic pool.’ For Paricio, working in his studio in Barcelona (in close proximity to the Mediterranean Sea) helped to enliven his pool paintings with bright hues. In their pool paintings, both Paricio and Hockney subvert the traditional association of the colour with sadness, imbuing their blue compositions with a sense of jubilant escapism.

Throughout history and across cultures, gold has been used in works of art to denote divinity. From the gilded interiors of Byzantine churches to the haloes of saints in Renaissance altarpieces, gold has been used to reflect a deeper spiritual meaning. Although in some contexts, gold can be a symbol of the eternal and the sacred, in other settings gold can represent unbridled opulence and transient materialism. This juxtaposition between the earthly and the spiritual realms adds a layer of unsettling complexity to the works of Santiago Montoya, who uses banknotes and gold leaf to provide commentary on the idolisation of money and the insatiable pursuit of wealth in the modern world.

Montoya’s work often centres Colombian identity and engages with themes of currency, capitalism and the illusion of prosperity. Golden Forever Forever was created using precisely rolled one-dollar bills, which were then gilded with 24 kt gold leaf. The artist’s use of gold, and its historic connotations of decadence and exploitation, further entangles the work’s meaning, hinting at the unseen human cost behind material possession. By elevating the piece with a near-religious reverence, Montoya highlights the problematic deification of money in contemporary consumer culture.

Montoya holds an enduring fascination with gold and has previously experimented by incorporating gold leaf and chocolate in the 2017 exhibition Mal Paso (y Otros Senderos) at Espacio El Dorado in Bogotá. The exhibition reflected on the riches of Colombia’s land while shedding light on the problems surrounding the gold mining industry, including dangerous working conditions, exploitation and depletion of natural resources. In subsequent exhibitions, Montoya has explored the idea of El Dorado, the mythical lost city of gold. Supposedly hidden somewhere in South America, the myth became a highly symbolic allegory of the 16th and 17th century colonial expeditions, and the endless European impulse to exploit these lands.

Montoya’s continued return to gold as both a subject and a medium is a deeply personal one. His interest in the precious metal stems from his upbringing in Bogotá, where, as a child, he witnessed artisans panning for gold in the rivers close to his home. This tedious and low-cost mining technique, which involves workers sifting the riverbed with a sieve-like pan, manually releasing sand, soil and alluvial deposits in the hope of revealing any gold sediment that lies within the river. The work is painstaking and returns a low yield of gold. This early exposure to the laborious process of extracting the metal has deeply influenced Montoya’s perception of value, both in economic and cultural terms, and he seeks to use it as a medium to challenge systems of power.

Since ancient times, gold has been used symbolically in art both as a colour and as a medium. In Western art, the colour has notably been used within a religious context, including the Renaissance paintings of Giotto, Fra Angelico and Sandro Botticelli (who liberally applied gold pigment to his c.1484-86 painting The Birth of Venus). As a material it has also been used extensively in Asian art and architecture, especially from Thailand and Japan to adorn temples and statues. For these artists, gold symbolised the divine and was seen as befitting for such spiritual subject matter. More recently, gold has become an important medium for 19th and 20th century artists such as Gustav Klimt, who used it lavishly to accentuate the sensuality and beauty associated with the Art Nouveau period. Andy Warhol also used gold in his Pop Art portraits to provoke a dialogue on consumerism, celebrity and the modern world. In Gold Marilyn Monroe (1962), Warhol adopted the colour for its timeless associations with wealth, divinity and enlightenment. Following the tragic death of Marilyn Monroe, Warhol depicted the movie star like a 20th century saint, reminiscent of a Byzantine icon shrouded in gold. Montoya recognises these traditional connotations, and builds on Warhol’s sharp perceptions of capitalism, adopting a contemporary viewpoint of gold also as a symbol of overconsumption.

In the 21st century this material remains highly seductive, but Montoya reminds us that beneath its allure lies a critique of society’s tendency to covet wealth. Montoya’s Gold Forever Forever highlights the ephemerality of wealth – by emblazoning the word ‘Forever’ in gold across endless rows of banknotes, the artist reminds us of the illusion of permanence in the material world.

Transcending the use of words and even form, colour in art strikes us on an instinctual level to communicate a feeling or a narrative. Each of the artists in Halcyon’s Summer Exhibition harness the universal language of colour to provoke an historical association, to resonate on an emotional level or to create a new meaning altogether. The works in this exhibition remind us that colour is not merely seen – it is felt, experienced and embodied.

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[¹] Jonathan Spaulding, ‘On L.A.: Light/ Motion/ Dreams: Developing an Exhibition on the Natural and Cultural History of Los Angeles’, Environmental History, (10.2), April 2005, pp.295-313, p.301.