Artist Anna Evans: We need to talk about Magenta

Welcome to the Colour Time Podcast. I am your host Vincent Taylor. This is the podcast where we speak with professionals who work with colour. Very often on the show I'm chatting to folks within the film and television industry because of my background as a colourist. But the goal of this podcast was to speak to people in all sorts of disciplines who work with colour and today we're gonna do that. Today we're chatting to an amazing painter Anna Evans. Anna is based

in New Zealand. She works with beautiful beautiful colour. Check out the show notes that'll link to her work but you're gonna love this conversation. Let's go. Take your seats because the hourglass is about to turn. We are entering the world of the micro podcast. Explore the craft, creativity and science of professionals who use colour to tell stories. Welcome to the Colour Timer with Vincent Taylor. Anna, hi. Thank you for joining me. Thank you for

having me. Absolutely. I should say Kia ora because I actually grew up in New Zealand but you are a New Zealander but you're not a New Zealander. What's your background? Yes. I was born in Rochdale, England which is northern Manchester and I migrated to New Zealand Auckland area as well when I was 11. Yeah so you're pretty much Kiwi now right? Yeah well I feel like a Kiwi but you know I guess culturally identity wise I'm a migrant, long history of migrants. Long history of migrants.

I migrated all around the world. Well I'm gonna, two seconds before we started the recording I said that I have in the past sometimes started interviewing people and forgot to start my sand time out and I almost forgot this time so I'm gonna start it. Are you ready for

the game show to begin? Here we go. Now I discovered you or I kind of actually my wife sent me a video of something you had done. You were an artist, you're a painter and she showed me this really cool video you did talking about primary colours. Now primary colours are red, green and blue. Red, green and red, yellow and red, yellow and blue. I'm thinking of video. See I did it already but you're saying but you're saying no. You're saying you got a different opinion. No yeah I'm

saying the primary colours are cyan, yellow and magenta and they're the subtractive primary colours. So the primary colours you just first mentioned red, green and blue are the additive primary colours and the ones that we were taught in primary school was red, yellow and blue and the other ones I

dispute. So tell me about that. Why? Okay so I guess this all started way way way back in time when I was probably about four or five and we were learning primary colours at school and the teacher gave us the red, the yellow and the blue and told us that we can make green with blue and yellow and yeah we could make green and we can make orange with red and yellow and we could make orange and she told us that we can make purple with blue and red but that's not what happened because well she

had probably given us a warm red a vermillion or something and a warm blue and so when they mixed together they made this kind of like almost I would say it would be like a more darker brown version of what I wanted like a kind of deep maroon burgundy brown dried blood colour.

So I was never very happy with that and I always wanted to make those really vibrant pinks and purples that we get and then years past years past I learnt a bit more as I got older about painting and mixing colours and then I was introduced to a teacher that showed us that if we used a cold red and a warm red the cold red and the cold blue would give us something closer to a purple but it still wasn't quite right and then I started by that stage I was about 15 or

16 and I was looking up on the internet all about colour and my dad who happened to teach science had one of those I guess they're like slip things you shine the light through and then I found out all about red green and blue and how the secondary colours of red green and blue are cyan yellow and magenta and how that related to print so all went through that process and then I found out that yes sure enough all the colour printers are cyan yellow and magenta. Oh my gosh

what a journey. And it made perfect sense from there that if we just go and get magenta and blue we can make beautiful purple so I managed to get some paint and sure enough yeah I was able to paint purples and pinks which is what I had always wanted to do. What was the thing that you was that like a kaleidoscope you mean or what was that you're saying your dad had?

No so in in the physics department and they have like I think it's called a slit thing basically you shine light through to see the light waves and I guess the waves and the light shines through and when you mix the colours up you can even do it with light if you get three torches with red green and blue light and combine all the light together it will show the white because all the light mix you'll know that yeah and then you get like red and blue and it will give you

magenta and then you get red and green and it'll give you yellow so in light that's how it works and so what's happening is that the secondary colours when they're mixing is making the pigment primary colours so they're kind of inside out versions of each

other. Yeah it does it does. I think it's to do with because light how light bounces off an object so when the Sun's shining down and we're seeing something that I guess to us appears green what's happening is it's absorbing all of the stuff that makes it magenta and that light's bouncing back yeah and it becomes green so I think that's why they work inside out of each other but the same thing happens with subtractive primary colours so when we mix cyan and

yellow we get green and when we mix yellow and magenta we get red or orange depending on how we balance it out and then between magenta and cyan we get blue as we know it like that kind of ultra marine. Oh yes. I guess we call it. Now yes see I told you this would go fast I'm already looking at the sand timer, I go oh I've got so many more

questions. To me at least it speaks volumes that as a little girl you kind of went hang on that's that's not right or that or at least it at least it planted a seed or put a little splinter in there where you just went oh it's not that's not what it should be or whatever

and you it's not the right colour. No and you'd get teachers that would say mix a bit of white in it and be like okay mix a bit of white in it and then it just was like a mauve-y beige brown it wasn't purple you know what I mean so and I was always one of those I was a bit like you know I'm the imprint new clothed child that's like no no Miss that ain't right that's not purple this is brown what this is just not purple and then oh my gosh they hated you right

hmm that's what I was one of those like know it all kids I guess to be honest but you what whatever whatever it was in you to keep exploring that I mean I've introduced you as a painter and oh

my gosh are you a painter I love your work it's so and and and here's the thing about your paintings that I love so much they're really really bright and colorful but they're not as well it's this really it's really hard for me to articulate yeah yeah well thank you I guess - I hope it was a compliment it was supposed to be No, no. I'll take it.

it's an interesting that my work has definitely gone through a big transition period since I had my little boy just because time is super condensed and you don't have as much and also just I guess - since like you're become a mother you sort of it's like another adolescence in many ways you just go through a change I suppose and I guess that reflects in my work as an artist a little yeah maybe you paint

you know your landscapes but a lot of birds what is it about the birds that draws you in oh well that's again um that almost feels like a lifetime ago because since I had my boy I have been painting a lot a few birds but not a lot a large body of my work was birds and I don't know why I was drawn to birds for the longest time I guess that was a sense of freedom and and that there were all these birds that are bright colored and they're not really of a memory of me

from when I was a small child where they're those more brownie kind of gray colors of UK birds like the colors in New Zealand are wildly different to where I come from as a child like Manchester's really industrial browns grays the sky itself is kind of more often than not dull and when I arrived in New Zealand it's like super bright and colorful and there's all these crazy looking exotic trees and I suppose the birds are kind of a way of capturing how I would view New Zealand before

migrants like me came do you know what I mean like it's a land that didn't have mammals until humans arrived and brought them apart from a bat so I guess the birds are like the original owners of New Zealand well going going back going

- Going back a lifetime ago... - They were the ones that were here first when I did do art history and I remember studying don't ask me any names but I remember studying some Kiwi painters you know Europeans who came to New Zealand and they were so struck by the quality of the light and the colors and and that really kind of changed the way that they they painted or at least what they explored I mean that sounds almost exactly like you're what you're talking about.

Yeah well I guess it is because I mean I obviously was 11 so it's I'm not coming at it from an adult viewpoint but it has always stuck with me the intensity of light when I arrived here like I remember the first morning we woke up and it was an incredible sunrise it was these beautiful pinks and oranges and these gradients of just like an explosion of magenta and orange it was just the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen and I was like well so this is where

we're living now oh cool this is amazing and then later in the day we went out and we went to Takapuna Beach and it was just turquoise the water and I was like whoa like I thought that this was something from Treasure Island you know because you'd see like - that's fantastic - but yeah a lot different from where I can I love I love I love watching you as you're talking about color you just you kind of light up for yourself and it's wonderful it's really cool it's

probably my most favorite thing to talk about or argue about well you said you said that you know you haven't been doing birds as much so so what have you maybe moved on to another topic or yeah my latest

obsession actually has been gardens yeah, obsession and gardens and it all comes from again this is related to color fascination with dahlias or dahlias I believe they're actually supposed to be pronounced as dahlias so the way a dahlia grows yeah potatoes potatoes well yes so what I found out and this is what made me obsessed with them is when you plant a dahlia seed you have no idea what color it's gonna come out or what shape so you I could get a seed from a red dahlia

and when I plant it I don't know whether it's gonna be a frilly double they call them or like a single with one row of petals so it's completely a surprise and so when you plant the seed you have no idea what's gonna come out and then like between 70 and 90 days later you've got this surprise flower and so I just thought that's the coolest thing ever I can plant like you know hundreds of these things and I'm gonna have an explosion of random colors and I don't

know what they're gonna be like and so I did it for one season and I just fell in love and then I just started growing more and more and more and then I just became obsessed with like crossbreeding dahlias and then and then I was like oh dahlias are cool and then there's all these other flowers and so I just yeah again that's after I had my son and I think it's I started doing that because when you're carrying up because I carried my boy around I was one of those

mums that had the slings and he was just always with me so gardening was like this new creative outlet that I just fully threw myself into and yeah when I when I become obsessed with something I do...

When you're approaching a painting or when you're starting a painting whether it be birds or the gardens the plants the flowers do you have a sense already of the colors that are gonna go into that or do they

come as your painting? That's interesting so like I've got this work right here with me this one I did as a speed painting so one of the things I'm doing this year has been I really want to speed myself up and get more looser and fluid with how I paint so I've been setting aside between an hour and 90 minute sessions a day to do some paintings and basically because that goes so fast I have no choice but to just sort of like be intuitive and let it go so this is based on one of those

paintings which was yeah I was just painting and then I thought I'll put some purple in there and I'll make this yeah I'll do some Queensland's lace and I'll put some blue asters and things like that and there's some salvia and and yeah at that point is I think that purple will go real nice with this purple or this blue so it becomes a bit about orchestrating but yeah it's I think it's a bit of both like like I do kind like when they come onto a canvas I know what they're gonna be because I've

thought about it before but when they're in that first study stage no it's a bit more like I will play and see what kind of instinctually comes out that's amazing that's so fascinating yeah it reminds me how I'm not even though there's a guitar behind me I'm not a musician but it reminds me of how musicians talk about you know they've got their especially jazz musicians you know they've got they start off with something structure and then it kind of

yeah yeah it turns into something else yeah like it's like something influences it's like you're responding to you'll do something and then you've got to respond to it and one part will inform the next part and it just sort of builds from there that's how yeah it's probably

quite like Jazz. yeah and are you is it is it oil paint you use is that where you the medium that you use or acrylic no I'm using acrylic because again it's speed factor time I've got my little one around I'd love to get back into oils like I used to paint with oils when I was at university and um so one day it's it's my dream when I finally get this the shed studio properly skidded out so that I can do it safely and have things dry and away yeah yeah of course then yeah

do you do you yeah do you ever have to push yourself to paint or is it the opposite like you just want to paint all the time how does that work with your drive I want to paint all the time I want to paint all the time and life gets in my way that's that that's how I'd put it but the cool thing about being a mom is I have learned to be less indulgent on one thing you know like like I'm with my work like because I put my first point of energy goes into him and then

everything else is from that so I've got that's what the speed paintings are about yeah get faster and looser and yeah just see where it takes me take off folks folks who have watched listen to the podcast know that I'm terrible at sticking exactly to the time but the time has stopped but I've got one more kind of question that I want to ask you it's not a specific question actually it's it's more

about do you have a color that you kind of tend to avoid you know like I used to work with a guy on a show and he just despised magenta and he'd start to see magenta where there wasn't magenta you know is there a color like that or the opposite one that you always just gravitate to?

Well that's that is interesting I don't do it consciously but I have noticed from my paints that the colors that I use least of is red red red or yellow and it might be that because I use magenta instead of red that I do if I need a red I will use that of course but I can also I guess mix something similar to a red with magenta and yellow so it might be that it's red and yellow those interesting probably least used I think I'm more drawn to the magenta blue green cyan side of the

spectrum I would say at this point yeah what what but I don't hate any color speaking of red what what did

you think of the latest reveal for the King Charles portrait painting ah that's an interesting one um I feel like the artist knew the response it would have I do feel that I feel like any artist who's using pinks and reds in such a bodily sense it looks very internal inside body fluids I think that they knew the - how that would be provocative I think it yeah it's an interesting one I don't I yeah it's it to me I mean because when I it looks it

looks war it look it looks like war to me but that's just because I view those colors and associate them with horror like if I was gonna make a horror movie it probably have a lot of those colors in it yeah I do yeah and I feel like an artist would know that I wonder I wonder I wonder if the artist to I wonder if they have to if they have to say look this is the style or this is where I'm going to with this painting or or if they're just left alone to do their thing yeah I wonder that too I mean

there's been some I can't remember there was some Queen back in the day yeah yeah yeah when I say day I mean last century yeah and I believe that they weren't happy with portrait of done of her and they didn't even pay the artist so I don't know I may maybe maybe the artist was like oh I'll take a punt I'll make it look kind of out there and I'll at least it's certainly got talked about maybe now speaking of names being remembered hopefully folks are gonna check out your

work because I've totally totally loved talking to you and I knew I would I knew I would I could tell I could tell by that first video I watched I went oh you sound so interesting in the way that you you get enthusiastic about things and you just don't stop I love it I love it so thank you so much for for jumping on the podcast with me I really really appreciate it. thank you Vincent It's been lovely talking to you too. Thank You.

Anna, thank you so much you're amazing that was a really good conversation and and I love your paintings they are so beautiful thank you to my executive producer MixingLight.com There's a high chance that you're watching this or listening to this via their website so you probably already know what they do but if you don't check them out they can help you all things color and thank you to you the listener thanks for you keep chiming in and you keep leaving really cool

comments and asking some great questions so so please please keep them coming it's really really awesome and yes again you can get t-shirts I know it's ridiculous but people ask for them I'll put a link in the show notes for that as well you can get your very own color timer t-shirt and impress your friends Thanks a lot and I'll see you on the next one. Bye. The color timer a micro podcast experience.