Palettes

Gaslit interiors: deep jewel dyes, tarnished metal and the dark polish of nineteenth-century wood

Neon void - the 80s that never was

Neon city grid at speed: Vice City on a summer night

Ferrari silhouette against a laser-grid sunset: full throttle

Rain-slick asphalt and purple neon bleeding into the dash

Club lights 1982 - gold and laser

Peak disco: champagne and mirrored ball on velvet dark

Mediterranean summer: white walls, azure sea, and sunset flame

Pure neon: laser fog and mirror ball scatter

Fashion decade - bold and graphic

Post-punk cool - angular and electric

Cold wave: steel blue and grey in a Sheffield warehouse

Angular guitar and dyed hair: Joy Division colours

Neon dystopia - beauty in decay

Rain-soaked city block: danger in every neon puddle

Megacorp brand colours turned against the corp itself

Bladerunner rain: wet asphalt reflecting kanji signage

Dark romantic - beauty in shadow

Siouxsie dark: velvet and silver at the Batcave

Gas-lit parlour: mourning dress and pressed flowers

Street signal - raw and immediate

Polished chrome throw-up on a subway car

Full-colour burner: every nozzle open at once

Tag on cold grey: urban surface as canvas

Shocking pink against black and bone, with a flat blue that could be a sky or a wall

Halftone primary - loud and democratic

Factory silkscreen: celebrity as product, product as art

Ben-Day dots and primary flatness: comic book as fine art

Murakami's post-nuclear cute: kawaii and catastrophe

Ironic pastels - knowing and playful

Plate glass, chrome and flat daylight

Oil and canvas warmth from the studio

Cool oil palette built from lapis and lead white

Italian underpainting tones of grey-green, flesh, and ochre

Late-night lamplight on canvas: deep shadow and ember warmth

Plein air light dissolving into atmosphere

Monet's water garden in morning mist and lily-pad green

Warm afternoon light dissolving the edges of everything

Pale northern sky reflected in cold-blue snow and bare branches

Gestural intensity on raw canvas

Primary construction - form follows function

Muted Dessau craft: pigment worn from repeated use

Herbert Bayer's universal type: form stripped to letter and grid

Extended Bauhaus colour theory: Itten's sphere in six

Bone, ivory and black with the light doing the colour: a held curve reads in one highlight

Charcoal and chalk with the canvas showing: the colour of a jacket before it is finished

Quiet opulence - restraint as status

The orange box: restraint that costs more than extravagance

Parisian high fashion: black and rose gold in a quiet room

Maritime quiet: navy, white rope, and brass fittings

Earth pigment and undyed fibre, layered until the room reads as collected rather than chosen

Flax, indigo, walnut and madder: the colours a plant, a root and a vat give cloth

Earth and fire - kiln-born color

Korean grey-green reduction glaze: the colour of jade and sky

Naked raku: unpredictable iridescence from sudden flame and smoke

Ming dynasty cobalt on porcelain: precise and eternal

Ink play - handmade and expressive

DIY zine: xerox, scissors, and Letraset

Bleed-through marker strokes: expressive and uncontrolled

Chalk on slate: teaching as mark-making

Pressed, matte and unlit: colour that behaves like pigment in the material rather than light on a surface

Polar light on a night sky: saturated colour with no edge and no source

Electric spectrum of the modern digital canvas

Phosphor green cascading through the machine void

Electric spectrum of the modern digital canvas at full saturation

8-bit gradient from deep purple to burning orange

Storm grey and slate with one reflective note: colour that stays out of the weather's way

Digital kawaii - neon and cute

Takeshita Street kawaii meets Akihabara neon

Digital avatar: pink void and impossible softness

Raw concrete and structural steel

Modern curtain wall: sky reflected in steel and glass

Board-formed béton brut: texture made honest

Sun-bleached earthen walls rising from the desert floor

Desert megastructure at midday: pale stone terraces threaded with garden green under a thin high-altitude sky

Raw béton brut as moral statement, mass without apology

London's concrete city: walkways suspended between monolithic towers

Safdie's stacked cubes: each apartment a shifted concrete box

Defensive mass: windowless concrete slab as civic statement

Form follows function, ornament is crime: the century's great rupture