In Defence of Colour: A Call for a Colour Renaissance in Art and Design
Walk through most new neighbourhoods, office lobbies, or Instagram interiors today and you’ll see a recurring aesthetic: neutrals. White walls. Black tapware. Grey furniture. Charcoal cladding. Cream linen. If colour appears at all, it’s apologetically; a sage green throw, a dusty pink accent wall, a beige ceramic vase.
This is the world we’ve built: calm, tasteful, restrained, and deeply afraid of colour.
In contemporary art, architecture, and design, colour has been pushed to the sidelines. It’s often dismissed as too loud, too emotional, too risky, too “unsophisticated.” But it wasn’t always this way and it doesn’t have to be.
It’s time for a colour renaissance.
Where Did We Go Wrong?
The global design world has spent the past two decades romanticising minimalism, Scandinavian cool, and high-end monochrome. This aesthetic; clean lines, desaturated palettes, matte finishes, has been packaged as timeless, refined, and intelligent.
But in doing so, we’ve equated blandness with sophistication, and uniformity with taste. Somewhere along the way, colour became taboo in architectural discourse. Too childish. Too feminine. Too unpredictable. Too hard to sell.
And now we’re left with cities full of charcoal box homes, interiors that feel like iPhone operating systems, and public spaces that echo the inside of an Apple Store.
This isn’t a style, it’s a symptom. A symptom of cultural homogenisation, risk aversion, and a fear of standing out.
Colour as Culture: Learning from Other Design Traditions
While many Western design centres have embraced the grayscale, other parts of the world have never let go of colour.
In Mexico City, colour is everywhere. Not just in murals or textiles, but in architecture. Buildings are painted in cobalt blues, ochres, oranges, pinks, and turquoises. This isn’t kitsch, it’s culture. It’s confidence.
Latin American cities, Moroccan interiors, Indian temples, and Caribbean architecture all remind us that colour can carry memory, meaning, and mood. It can be modern and traditional, sacred and playful, grounded and radical, all at once.
Instead of erasing identity in the name of “good taste,” these places use colour to express it.
Art History Has Always Valued Colour
Throughout art history, the greatest leaps in visual culture have often been tied to the bold use of colour:
The Fauves (literally “wild beasts”) led by Henri Matisse, shocked critics by using intense, unnatural colours not to mimic life, but to evoke feeling.
The Bauhaus embraced primary colours as building blocks of form and function.
Abstract Expressionists like Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler used colour fields to elicit emotion on a near-spiritual scale.
The Memphis Design Group exploded mid-century modernism with unapologetically saturated palettes and playful contrasts.
In each case, colour wasn’t an afterthought, it was the language. A way to speak directly to the body and psyche.
So why are we now whispering in greyscale?
The Power of Colour: Emotion, Energy, and Identity
Colour is not decoration. It is communication.
Red can activate.
Blue can soothe.
Yellow can energise.
Pink can protest.
Green can ground.
These associations are not arbitrary. They’re ancient, cross-cultural, and deeply embedded in how we experience space. To remove colour from our built environments is to remove feeling, memory, and joy.
Neutral palettes may be easy to sell, but they’re rarely remembered. Bold colour choices linger. They stay with us. They mark a place. They create emotional resonance, and often, cultural relevance.
In Public Art, Colour is an Act of Reclamation
As a muralist, I work on urban surfaces that are often grey, tired, or ignored. When I add colour, unapologetically, expansively, something shifts. People slow down. Children point. Locals stop to chat. A wall that was once background becomes a site of energy and attention.
In this way, colour becomes a kind of public service. It reminds us that we are not just function-driven creatures, but sensory beings who thrive on stimulation, beauty, and surprise.
It’s Time to See in Colour Again
We are living in colourless times. Not because colour has disappeared, but because we’ve been taught to distrust it. To tone it down. To match the greige next door.
But this isn't sophistication, it's creative fear. And it’s time to move beyond it.
Let’s reintroduce colour into our homes, our streets, our galleries, and our minds. Let’s celebrate it as a force of identity, vibrancy, and joy. Let’s take risks again, in paint, in space, in vision.
The world doesn’t need more beige, it needs brilliance.