‘Aurore’ is a series of paintings made from about 1990 onwards. it continues the exploration of colour relationships on a shaped canvas begun in the works for my debut show in 1981. I first made a painting on a right-angle triangle -shaped support with the apex pointing upwards, similarly to the ones in my 1981 show. I was not satisfied and turned the canvas upside down. Now the painting resembled a landscape, like a mountain range in crepuscular light or sand dunes in a desert. This worried me at first, since I thought I was making totally abstract art, but soon the beauty of the sense of atmosphere and natural illuminations at different times of day grew on me.

The colour scheme is a sequence or scale progressing from saturated to neutral. I have restricted the lightness contrasts to a minimum in order to emphasize the chromatic interaction. In a scale like this, the tiniest error in tinting the colour will cry out like an exclamation mark. Mixing the colours felt like tuning a musical instrument; when I got it right, I felt that the painting “sounded in tune”. The various colour scales could be likened to both lighting effects and keys or chords in music.