The Room Where Colour Decides Itself
A local painter working in her studio, quietly mixing colours and building a small flower painting.
The studio is already awake before I even step inside.
On the open day for local artists, the door is propped open with a paint-splattered box, and the smell of oil, dust and coffee drifts out into the corridor. It is a small space, low-ceilinged and crowded, but everything in it seems to be doing the same quiet work: holding a world in place until the paint dries.
An easel stands in the middle of the room like a piece of furniture that has grown roots. On it, a small canvas: a vase of flowers, thick with wet colour. Next to the real bouquet - a bright purple bloom in a patterned pot - the painting looks almost shy, still deciding what it wants to become. A palette lies balanced on the table, a landscape of mixed pigments: reds and greens pushed into one another, a thin vein of blue, a spot of uncompromising white. Nothing is finished, and that is exactly the point.
Around this improvised altar of work, the walls are already crowded with faces. Portraits look down from every side: a woman raising a glass, another lost in thought, a man lit from above so that his expression feels both vulnerable and stern. Some are framed in dark wood, others simply stretched on canvas, but together they form a kind of temporary family - the painted people, who share the studio with the artist day after day.
Unlike a museum, nothing here has the distance of glass or the silence of strict rules. There are postcards for one euro, stacked in a cardboard display; sketchbooks leaning against the wall; brochures with the artist’s name spread on the table like invitations. Tubes of paint sleep in shallow trays. A rag, stiff with colour, hangs from the edge of a cart. The studio feels less like a shrine to finished artworks and more like a breathing organism: messy, practical, alive.
During the open day, visitors move through the narrow space in small waves. Some stand in front of the portraits and try to guess the story behind each face. Others lean in to inspect the hydrangea on the easel, comparing each brushstroke to the curve of a petal in the vase. A few people simply watch the artist’s hands as they hover over the palette, deciding which colour to pick up next.
It is a rare thing, to see the moment before a painting becomes something official. In galleries and catalogues, we are used to the afterlife of art: the titles, the dates, the final decisions already made. Here, we witness the during. A line can still be shifted, a shadow deepened, a background softened. The canvas is not yet a completed statement. It is a question in progress.
The atmosphere is both intimate and strangely public. The artist’s tools - normally companions in solitude - are suddenly on display. Their chair, their notes, their coffee cup, even the smears of paint on the floor become part of what people look at. At first this feels almost too personal, as if we are trespassing in someone’s private ritual. But as the conversations start - about pigments, models, light, prices, commissions - the space gently shifts into something else: a small, temporary community built around the simple fact that someone still chooses to spend their days mixing colour and watching it dry.
What moves me most, is how ordinary everything looks. The glamour we’re used to seeing attached to art - the big museum, the flawless lighting, the carefully curated captions - is replaced by a lamp with a crooked neck, a roll of paper on the table, the sound of a pencil scratching on a sign-up sheet. It is a reminder that behind every polished exhibition lies this kind of room: a place where ideas are allowed to be awkward, where portraits fail before they succeed, where a flower is painted slowly enough that you begin to feel its weight rather than just its outline.
The finished works on the wall suddenly seem different when I look back at them. Knowing that they were born in this very room, among the rulers, notebooks and boxes on the floor, strips away some of the untouchable aura and replaces it with something more human. These faces are not abstract “works”. They are the accumulation of many afternoons like this one, of false starts, corrections and small decisions only the artist will ever fully understand.
Open studio days are often advertised as opportunities for the public to “meet the artist,” but what I feel I have really met is the process. I have seen, how a painting shares the room with unpaid bills, dirty brushes and half-finished cups of tea, how artmaking folds itself around the everyday rather than floating above it. There is a quiet courage in continuing to paint under such ordinary conditions, in trusting that a small canvas of flowers can still matter in a world that rarely sits still long enough to look.
As I leave, the studio door is still open behind me. The portraits on the wall remain, where they are, watching over the easel, the hydrangea in its vase will keep on blooming for a few more days. Somewhere inside, a new layer of colour will be added, then another, until the small painting on the easel is ready to join the others on the wall - or to leave the studio altogether and begin its own life elsewhere.
For now, though, it belongs here, in the place, where it was born. And for a brief moment on this open day, I was allowed to stand inside that birthplace and listen to the quiet sound of a painting becoming itself.
