A Geography of Colour

Aaron Kudi is a contemporary painter, born in Bauchi, Nigeria, he lives and works in London. He grew up between Nigeria and London and Devon in the UK. He has a BSc in Psychology from London Metropolitan University, an MSc in Psychology from University College London and worked as a sculptor before becoming a painter. Aaron has undertaken residencies at Thread, Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, Senegal, 2024 and the British School at Rome, 2025. He is currently studying in the second year of an MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Aaron’s practice explores aspects of human experience and consciousness in relation to our contemporary world. His paintings are abstract with echoes of figuration. Combining gesture, colour and surface, Aaron explores the materiality of paint to evoke sensations of the immaterial, with both a sense of intimacy and unease. He says ‘I’ve come to think of painting as a kind of tending a slow, sometimes painful cultivation of what must grow and what must go. My own garden has been seeded by many things: the faith and science that lived side by side in my childhood home, the Nigerian Pentecostal rhythm of prayer and praise, the analytical precision of my father’s scientific mind, and the layered questions of belonging that come with moving between cultures. These early contradictions planted a fascination with dualities: control and surrender, knowing and feeling, faith and doubt. My painting practice, at its core, lives in the space between those states, between what I intend and what I could never fully control.’

Jo Hummel is a contemporary British painter who lives and works on the Isle of Wight. She trained at the Royal College of Art and has established an international exhibition profile across the UK, Europe, the United States and South Africa. Her work is rooted in reductionism, using symbols and sacred geometry and engages with ancient spiritual concepts such as Sunya, the Sanskrit term for void and infinity, concerning the balance between emptiness and possibility. Colour assumes a pivotal role in Jo’s work, valued both for its subjective sensory impact and its psychologically transcendent qualities. Jo works with paper, collaging to create paintings through a careful balance of shape, colour, form, and material. Jo has had several solo shows including Stars Wrapped in Skin at Victor Lope Contemporaneo, Barcelona (2025), Looking Out, Barnard Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa 2023, Somewhere Here, But Far Away, 45 Park Lane, London, 2023 and two person shows at Gruin Gallery, Los Angeles and Fold Gallery, London. Her work has been shown in major group exhibitions including Flowers Gallery, London, Interface at Lille Grand Palais, Art Karlsruhe, Germany, the London Art Fair and the 53rd Venice Biennale. Her paintings are held in various collections including Christian Dior, Clintons, London, the Kilburn Foundation (Cape Town), LinkedIn London Headquarters, and The Shelborne Hotel, Miami Beach. Jo has received several grants from Arts Council England, including a DYCP Award in 2024. She is represented by The Tagli (London), Macadam Gallery (Brussels), Víctor Lope Contemporaneo (Barcelona), and Amelie du Chalard (Paris/New York). In Spring 2026 Jo will be Artist in Residence at Thread, Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, Senegal and in May 2026 she has a solo exhibition at Benjamin Eck Gallery, Munich.

A special edition of ‘A Geography of Colour’ podcast with painter Katrina Blannin, talking about colour and painting with Ruth Philo, from the Sluice Expo 'World Buidling' in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland with LungA School, originally broadcast on Seyðisfjörður Community Radio, May 2025. Katrina Blannin was born in London, UK where she currently lives and works. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1997 she has shown her work extensively in the UK and abroad, co-directed artist run project spaces, curated exhibitions and written about contemporary painting. In 2021 she completed a Painting by Practice PhD at the University of Worcester. She teaches as an Associate Lecturer at UAL Camberwell for BA Painting and Foundation Drawing/Conceptual Practice; UCA Canterbury and works both on the editorial board and the mentoring programme for Turps Banana, London, UK. https://www.katrinablannin.com/

Ruth Calland is a contemporary British painter, and also a Jungian analyst, ilving and working in London. Emergence and attunement to what is emergent, are the experiences that engage her. She has a deep interest in alchemy, which provides a framework for how she thinks about painting as process. She will often utilise two different points of reference and see them as creating an interactive field, within which she operates in order to investigate their relationship. She has a longstanding interest in gender, and her exploration of gender fluidity in her participative performance project Carnival of Souls took place across the E17 Arts Festival and the Folkestone Triennial in 2013. She presented this work at the conference ‘Alchemy: Exploring Metaphorical Transformations and Arts-Based Research’ at Oxford University in 2023. In the pandemic she was inspired by the early vampire film Nosferatu, with its monochrome landscapes, haunted by anxiety about infection by the supernatural other. At this time she also began researching trans experiences of being feared and othered, discussed by creators on TikTok. Her current work uses stills from these videos to amplify and celebrate trans voices, using high key colour to celebrate their cultural emergence from the shadows, and a redefinition of what it means to be natural, or true to nature.  Ruth is a member of Contemporary British Painting and has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Transition Gallery, Flowers East, Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery, Vestry House Museum, Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, and the Dulwich Festival. She has curated shows for APT, Walthamstow Wetlands, and Salthouse Gallery. She was included in the Made In Britain, 80 Painters of the 21st Century, at Yantai Museum, Nanjing and Tianjin in China, and Gdansk, Poland in 2019; she was selected for the New Contemporaries at the ICA and Bluecoat Galleries, was a prize-winner at Southwark Gallery Open, Painting Fellow at Gloucester Art College, a Rome Scholar runner up, Boise Travelling Scholarship winner, and included twice in the Marmite Prize for Painting. In 2022 she was artist in residence atPasture Project Space, Sudbury andrecently a finalist at the Artworks Open 2023, (Barbican Arts Trust). She lectures and writes on creative processes within Jungian psychoanalysis and in 2018 won the Fordham Prize for her paper ‘Race, Power and Intimacy’.  website: www.ruthcalland.com https://www.ruthphilo.co.uk/a-geography-of-colour.html

Mallory Page is a contemporary American painter, based in New Orleans. Mallory’s paintings employ multiple layers and hues of acrylic wash that cascade across large scaled canvas. Her interests lie in the study of the psyche, dreams and the subconscious.  She often tethers psychic sensations or observations to build work about creating deeper interactions with the sublime. Mallory was raised in Lafayette, Louisiana, a region with a vibrant, often mystical, culture and distinctive geographical landscape. She holds a B.I.D. from Louisiana State University and is currently a candidate for a Master’s in Fine Art from The Art Institute of Chicago.

Charley Peters is a contemporary British painter, who lives and works in London. She makes paintings where abstract language and screen aesthetics collide, remixing familiar motifs from art history, retro gaming, and internet culture. Charley explores contemporary painting as an expanded practice that is both physical and virtual, and not limited to the surface of a canvas. Although essentially abstract, her works remind us of our real world, suggesting a transition in our ways of seeing from the once-radical non-representation of high modernism to the everydayness of digital imagery. By working in the public sphere as well as in the studio, Charley’s work connects with a diverse range of audiences and reminds us that the power of creativity can change lives, enhance spaces and to experience the world differently.   Charley exhibits internationally, showing recently at Hauser & Wirth (London), Meakin + Parsons (Oxford), Yantai Art Museum (Yantai), and National Museum of Gdansk (Gdansk). Her clients include Meta, ITV, London Art Fair, House of Vans and Hospital Rooms. Charley completed a PhD in Fine Art Theory and Practice and has contributed to writing about painting to online and print publications. She is a visiting tutor at Fine Art at City & Guilds of London Art School, an offsite mentor at Turps Art School and a Postgraduate Senior Lecturer at UAL. https://charleypeters.com/ https://www.ruthphilo.co.uk/a-geography-of-colour.html

Marius von Brasch is German-British painter who lives and works on the Isle of Wight. His work highlights the power of unconscious filters that shape perception. Imagination, affects and memories, which pervade social life, history and the life of the soul, play a significant role in the emergence of each painting and work on paper. Marius’s practice aims to translate these layers and their different relationships to time. The emotional dynamics of colour and how to contain and give form to what seems to evade representation are central to the work. Figures and fragmented narratives in the paintings constellate multiple polarities and also, often echoing mythologies, deal with ideological postures prevalent today. He finds parallels to his approach in Renaissance illuminations in alchemical manuscripts and quotes them indirectly in his work. This symbolic alchemical imagery addresses journeys of identities and evolution of consciousness while proposing transformative ways of working with conflict and diversity. Marius’s interest here is to find new painterly ways to speak about these subjects and a dialogue with classical and contemporary painting allows him to be part of an ongoing living tradition. Marius received his MA with distinction from Winchester School of Art (Uni of Southampton) where he also completed his practice-based PhD in Fine Art Painting. He was awarded the Abbey Fellowship in Painting at The British School in Rome in 2013. With a background in psychotherapy and literature, Marius teaches experiential approaches to painting as well as courses on art and literature. His work is held in the Priseman Seabrook Collection, the University of Essex Modern and Contemporary British Art Collection, and in international private collections. He is represented by Jenn Singer Gallery, New York. Links: http://www.mariusvonbrasch.co.uk https://www.ruthphilo.co.uk/a-geography-of-colour.html Instagram @mariusvonbrasch Facebook https://www.facebook.com/mariusvonbrasch Jenn Singer Gallery http://jennsingergallery.com/mariusvonbrasch Book links: James Hillman, The Dream and The Underworld Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

Jenny is a Contemporary British painter, writer and lecturer based in the North West of England. Emerging from a process of close making and the complex relationship between two active objects of being, Jenny’s paintings embody the potential for visual and psychological oscillation. In this exchange between painter and painting, the process arrives at curious and insubstantial 'part-objects', simultaneously ‘separate from’ and ‘part of’ monochromatic spatial fields, operating in obscure, surface-smooth colour (un)realities.  Jenny received a BA in Fine Art from Birmingham School of Art in 2000, an MFA in Fine Art from Manchester School of Art in 2017 and she is currently undertaking a By Practice PhD in Painting at Manchester School of Art. Jenny lectures in Fine Art Painting at Manchester School of Art on the BA Fine Art and MA Painting programmes and she is Level 4 Year Leader in Fine Art. She also co-runs Oceans Apart, a gallery in Salford dedicated to contemporary painting, and she has exhibited her own work both nationally and internationally. Links: https://jennyeden.co.uk/ https://www.oceansapart.uk/ https://www.art.mmu.ac.uk/profile/jeden https://ahrc-metamodernism.co.uk/seattle-recordings/

This month on 'A Geography of Colour' podcast I am talking with painter Elizabeth Rose Langford about her relationship with colour. Elizabeth Rose Langford is a Contemporary British Painting currently living and working in Ibiza. She has a BA in English and Philosophy from Nottingham University and a BA Fine Art, City and Guilds of London School of Art. Lizzy’s practice is site responsive; she works with stories and materials from the land, using them to make paintings and suggest another way of seeing and engaging with the natural world. Her motivations are to draw attention to the current global crisis, working with organic matter to discuss unrelenting growth in the name of “progress” and humanity’s consequential dissociation from nature. Since 2013 Lizzy’s practise has centered around the inherent systems of natural materials. She spent four years after graduating learning traditional methods of extracting colour from plant and earth matter, which her current practise readdresses in an attempt to reveal something previously overlooked in the sole pursuit of pigment. She manifests these concerns with the action of painting, between the site of the pigments and the studio. Lizzy won the Griffin Art Prize in 2013 working collaboratively with Luke Cranswick and undertook a residency with Winsor and Newton in 2014 precipitating rose madder. Since then she has had solo shows in London, Ibiza and New York, taken part in numerous group shows and undertaken various residencies in Europe, the US and the UK. She is currently working on ‘REDiscover a research project with NOVA University Lisbon and UCL London. Lizzy’s is representated by Katrina Phillips, London. https://www.elizabethroselangford.com/ https://www.ruthphilo.co.uk/a-geography-of-colour.html http://katrinaphillipsltd.com/ https://www.thehuntressny.com/blogs/the-journey/from-ibiza-with-love?

Erin Lawlor is a contemporary British painter, she lives and works in London. After receiving her BA History of Art in 1992 from the Sorbonne University in Paris, Erin was based in France until 2013 when she returned to the UK. Since her first solo show in Paris in 2010, she has exhibited extensively around the world. Recent solo gallery exhibitions have included “Earthly Delights” at Vigo Gallery, London in 2023; and solo shows at Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC in 2022, at Luca Tommasi in Milan 2021 and at Fox/Jensen/McCrory Gallery, Auckland,in 2020. In 2017, a survey exhibition of Erin’s work, “onomatopoeia,” took place at the Rothko Center, Daugavpils, Latvia, and her work was showcased in “Maleri.Nu/Paint.Now,” at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2016. Earlier in 2023 she had her first institutional exhibition in the UK, ‘Invincible Summer’ at Wellington Arch, in partnership with Apsley House and English Heritage. In a recent catalogue essay David Anfam speaks of Lawlor’s paintings as ‘Cutting-edge contemporary, her work nevertheless has roots as deep and distant as Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which being is forever in a state of becoming.’ Erin’s work is in numerous public and private collections including the Women’s Art Collection, Cambridge, UK; the Mark Rothko Centre, Latvia, and the Kolon Museum Collection, Seoul. She is represented by Vigo Gallery, London, Miles McEnery Gallery, New York; Fox/Jensen and Fox/Jensen/McCrory galleries, Sydney and Auckland; and Luca Tommasi, Milan. Erin Lawlor https://www.erinlawlor.com/ A Geography of Colour https://www.ruthphilo.co.uk/a-geography-of-colour.html Vigo Gallery, London https://www.vigogallery.com/artists/43-erin-lawlor/overview/ Miles McEnenery Gallery, New York https://www.milesmcenery.com/artists/erin-lawlor Fox Jensen & Fox Jensen McCrory Galleries Sydney & Auckland https://www.jensengallery.com/erin-lawlor-2/ Luca Tomassi Gallery, Milan https://www.lucatommasi.it/artist/42