People often assume a painting starts with a plan. For me, it almost never does. It starts with a colour — a particular blue, a warmth I want to chase, a tension between two tones that I don’t yet understand. I follow it the way you follow a sound in another room, not quite knowing what I’ll find when I arrive.
Colour as a language
Long before a painting becomes “about” anything, it is about colour. Blue has stayed with me for years — not as a subject, but as a temperature, a kind of weather inside the work. Some pieces cool and quiet down; others build heat at their centre and refuse to settle. I think of each painting as a sentence in a language I’m still learning, one where the meaning lives in the relationships between tones rather than in any single shape.
Leaving room
I rarely want a work to say everything. The pieces I return to, my own and others’, are the ones that leave a little unfinished — an edge that dissolves, a passage that could be a horizon or could be nothing at all. That openness isn’t indecision. It’s an invitation. I would rather a painting ask a question than answer one, because the answer belongs to whoever is standing in front of it.
The slow part
Most of the work happens in waiting. I build in layers, let them dry, look for a long time, and often take away as much as I add. A piece can sit against the wall for weeks while I decide whether it is finished or merely quiet. I’ve learned that “finished” is less a moment than a feeling — the point where the painting stops needing me and starts holding its own breath.
Living with the work
Each piece is unique and made by hand, with all the small irregularities that come with that. Those are not flaws to me; they are the evidence of a real surface, a real day, a real decision. When a painting leaves the studio and finds a wall to live on, it begins a second life I’ll never fully see — and that, more than any exhibition, is what keeps me painting.
If a particular work speaks to you, or you’d like to talk about a commission in the same spirit, I’d genuinely love to hear from you.
— Eva Amnioti