I love the word ‘Atelier’ and all the images & scents it conjures up. I stumbled across Julien Tanguy and was quickly hooked.

Known as ‘Pierre Tanguy’ he owned a shop on Rue de Seine, St Germaine in the 1800s. As a purveyor of artists’ materials he supplied the likes of Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat & Van Gogh, who painted his portrait in 1887. I can just see his shop filled with apothecary jars full of ochres, aquamarine, pomegranate rinds, crushed up shells, cochineal, matta, indigo, snail ink, gold leaf, shellac, brushes, gesso, plinth, stools that twist & bottles of linseed oil.

He ran a small gallery on the side and often traded paintings for pigments which jam-packed his walls alongside his collection of ukiyo-o Japanese prints, a salon of it’s day- a place of conversation & ideas over a couple of glasses of absinthe.

My colours for Atelier were inspired from this story in deep Damascus reds, copper, ochre tones with an anchor of caramelly canvases, woods of artists' easels and Japanese lacquer black.