Colour has never been a stable language in my artistic practice. Like memory, it changes with time, with places lived, with the landscapes that inhabit us. Looking back at my work, I can trace my own life through the evolution of colour itself.
My early paintings were immersed in luminous, almost fairytale-like palettes. Brilliant blues, radiant reds, intense golds, emerald greens and deep violets created worlds suspended between reality and imagination. I was fascinated by the spiritual light of Byzantine icons, where colour does not imitate nature but reveals an invisible dimension. In those works, colour was symbolic, emotional, almost sacred.
Later, moving to Northern Europe, my palette gradually became quieter. The dramatic Nordic skies, the long winters, mist, rain and the subtle beauty of muted landscapes transformed the way I perceived light. I became increasingly interested in chromatic greys—not neutral colours, but greys alive with hidden blues, greens, violets, ochres and warm earth pigments. Rather than reducing colour, this period taught me to recognise its infinite nuances.
Grey became a space of silence.
It slowed my gaze and invited me to observe the almost imperceptible transitions through which light continuously transforms the visible world.
Today, through fibre art, colour has returned with renewed intensity.
Embroidery has allowed me to rediscover colour not simply as pigment but as material. Wool threads possess a physical presence that paint cannot imitate. Every strand carries its own vibration; every stitch becomes a small stroke of colour. Instead of blending on the palette, colours meet through weaving, layering and proximity. They remain independent while generating new optical harmonies.
In this sense, embroidery has unexpectedly brought me back to painting.
While researching the history of colour, I discovered that Vincent van Gogh carried a small case filled with coloured wool samples. He used them to study chromatic relationships before applying paint to canvas, testing complementary contrasts and colour harmonies through threads rather than pigments. This discovery felt surprisingly familiar.
Looking at Van Gogh’s paintings today, his brushstrokes often resemble woven fibres. Thick lines of pure colour run across the surface with extraordinary tactile energy. The paint itself seems to behave like thread.
Sometimes I feel that my embroidered works follow the opposite journey.
Instead of paint becoming thread, thread becomes paint.
Each stitch functions like an Impressionist or Expressionist brushstroke: autonomous, vibrant, alive. Seen from a close distance, every coloured thread maintains its individuality; from afar, the eye blends them into unexpected harmonies. In some works this optical vibration recalls the principles of Divisionism, where adjacent colours generate luminosity through perception rather than physical mixing.
The needle replaces the brush, yet the language remains remarkably similar.
Working with thread has also transformed my relationship with time. A painted gesture may last a second; an embroidered line requires patience, repetition and prolonged attention. Colour is no longer applied—it is slowly constructed, stitch after stitch, becoming almost a form of meditation.
Perhaps this is why I no longer think of colour merely as something that covers a surface.
Colour has become a living thread.
A thread capable of connecting painting and textile, gesture and contemplation, past and present, body and landscape.
Looking back, I realise that every phase of my artistic journey has had its own chromatic voice. The brilliant symbolic colours of my early paintings, the restrained chromatic greys of the North, and the vibrant tactile palette of my textile works are not separate chapters but different seasons of the same research.
Colour, after all, is never only about what we see.
It is about how we inhabit the world.
