My Colours Don't Belong to Pantone. They Belong to Me.
By Caroline Boff FRSA
Every January, the world holds its breath for a colour.
A corporation announces it. Designers pivot. Brands scramble. And for the next twelve months, that shade is everywhere — on shelves, on screens, on the walls of restaurants that want to seem current. We're told, in so many words, that this is what beauty looks like right now. That this is the colour of the moment, the feeling, the zeitgeist.
I've never painted to a zeitgeist in my life.
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The Problem With Letting Someone Else Define Your Palette
I understand why colour systems exist. There's something deeply human about wanting shared language — about agreeing, collectively, that red means danger and green means go. It makes the world navigable. It makes communication faster.
But somewhere along the way, "shared language" became "prescribed feeling." And that's where I have to part ways.
When you're told that blue is calm, that yellow is happiness, that grey is sophisticated — you're being handed someone else's emotional architecture and invited to live inside it. The invitation is polite. The framing is authoritative. But it's still someone else's structure, built from someone else's associations, serving someone else's purposes.
And if you're an artist — if you're anyone trying to express something true — then living inside someone else's emotional architecture is a very quiet kind of suffocation.
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What My Colours Actually Mean
Let me tell you what pink means to me.
Not what the colour psychology guides say. Not what the branding consultants recommend it for. What it means to me, the person who has pressed it into wet canvas with her hands, built it up in layers with paste and tissue paper, stared at it at eleven o'clock at night wondering if it was finished.
Pink, to me, is arrival. It's the specific feeling of turning a corner and finding yourself somewhere better than you expected. It carries the electricity of New York — that charge in the air when the city is just waking up and you realise you are exactly where you're supposed to be. It's a little dangerous. It's absolutely alive.
That's not a universal truth. It's my truth. Built from my life, my memories, my particular arrangement of experience.
Yellow, in my studio, is not caution or sunshine-optimism-by-default. It's something more complicated — it's tension before release, the held breath before the exhale. Sometimes it's courage. Sometimes it's the very edge of overwhelm. It depends on what's next to it, what's underneath it, what the rest of the painting is asking of it.
That ambiguity isn't a flaw. It's the whole point.
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Every Person Is an Individual. Act Like It.
Here's what I believe with my whole heart: every single person walking around on this earth is a complete, specific, unrepeatable individual.
Not a demographic. Not a trend cohort. Not a consumer segment. A person, with their own archive of colour memories and sensory associations — their own language of beauty, built over a lifetime of looking and feeling and living.
That means your relationship with colour is yours. Radically and entirely yours.
The shade that makes your breath catch — the one that, for reasons you can't fully articulate, makes you feel more yourself — that response is real data. It's more real, honestly, than any trend forecast. It comes from somewhere true in you, and it points toward something true about who you are and what you need around you.
I want to make something very clear: you are allowed to trust that.
You are allowed to hang a painting on your wall because it moves you, not because it was curated to be impressive. You are allowed to choose a colour because it speaks to you in your own private language, not because someone told you it was "on trend" or "timeless" or whatever other shorthand we use for approved.
Your reality is yours to create. Not someone else's obsessive directive about what you should want, what you should feel, what you should find beautiful.
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How I Paint — and Why It Matters
When I stand at my canvas, I'm not consulting a mood board. I'm not checking what's performing well on social media or what interior designers are specifying this season.
I'm listening.
I'm listening to whatever it is that brought me to the studio that day — the unresolved feeling, the remembered image, the thing I've been circling around for weeks and can't yet name. I'm listening to the canvas itself, to how the colours already on it are asking to be answered.
The paintings I make are built from texture as much as colour — paste and tissue paper and unexpected materials pressed into the surface, creating layers that you can almost feel from across the room. Because emotion has texture. It has weight and resistance and depth. Flat colour can be beautiful, but it doesn't bleed the way life does.
When someone stands in front of one of my paintings and says, "I don't know why, but this feels like coming home," — and they mean their home, not mine — that's not a coincidence. It's what happens when colour is used honestly, without the mediation of trend or committee or prescribed meaning.
It finds the part of you that already knew what it meant.
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An Invitation
The next time you find yourself in front of a piece of art — mine or anyone else's — I want to invite you to notice what happens before you start interpreting.
Before you think about whether it matches your interiors, whether it's the kind of thing you're "supposed" to like, whether it's sufficiently serious or sufficiently joyful or sufficiently whatever the current moment demands.
Just notice what happens in your body. What does the colour do to you, before language gets there?
That's your answer. That's your colour, speaking your language.
Trust it.
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Caroline Boff FRSA is a contemporary artist based in Manchester, creating bold acrylic paintings that explore emotion, movement, and the human condition. Her work has been exhibited in London, New York, and Miami, and featured in Vogue, Tatler, and Vanity Fair.
Original paintings, prints, and bespoke commissions: carolineboff.co.uk
Prints: carolineboff.art