What is a colourist? The artist who thinks in colour

Hi, it’s Théo! When people discovered my mother’s canvases, they often said the same thing: “what a colourist”. For a long time I took it as a simple compliment. In fact, it is a precise word, with a real history in painting. Here is what it means, and why it suited her so well.

What is a colourist?

A colourist is an artist for whom colour is not a tool serving the drawing, but the very subject of the work. Where some painters first build a shape, a line, a perspective, then “fill it in” with colour, the colourist starts from colour. It is colour that carries the emotion, the rhythm, the light. Drawing takes a back seat, and sometimes it disappears entirely.

The distinction is an old one. As early as the 17th century, art history set the champions of drawing, line and rigour against the champions of colour, sensation and life. Delacroix versus Ingres, later the Impressionists, then Bonnard, Matisse, Rothko or Zao Wou-Ki: in every generation, colourists reminded us that a single colour could be enough to move us.

Colour as a language

What truly defines a colourist is not the number of colours, but the relationship they hold with them. They know that a red does not have the same value next to a blue as it does next to an orange. They play with chords, contrasts, vibrations. A colour turns warm or cold, advances or recedes, soothes or awakens, depending on its neighbours.

This is exactly what we explore in our articles on the psychology of colours and on the power of colours: every shade acts on our emotions. The colourist turns that into a full language of its own.

Régine Gardan, a colourist

My mother, Régine Gardan, was a colourist in the fullest sense. She even organised her work into colour periods: a season of reds, one of blues, one of greens. Colour did not illustrate her paintings, it was their very heart. She worked it in oil, with a palette knife, to keep that living matter that catches the light.

Like many colourists, she admired Zao Wou-Ki, but also Rothko and Monet: painters for whom colour becomes a space you step into, rather than an image you look at.

Living with a colourist’s work

The strength of a colourist’s canvas is that it transforms a room without telling a story. No scene, no narrative: just a chromatic presence that changes the atmosphere. A deep blue brings calm, a solar yellow warms a dark room, a red gives character to a neutral wall.

That is also why a colourful abstract work suits almost any interior: it does not lock in a style, it brings an emotion. You choose it not for what it depicts, but for what it makes you feel.

A vitamin of colour for your walls

That is the whole point of Vitamin of Colors: to share the eye of a colourist, those colours she assembled by hand, one by one. Each canvas is a one-of-a-kind piece, signed and delivered with its certificate of authenticity.

Browse the collection and let a colour choose you.