“Colours, therefore, should be understood as subjective cultural creations: you could no more meaningfully secure a precise universal definition for all the known shades than you could plot the coordinates of a dream.”

- Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Colour*



As a consistent element to his process, Sayed often under paints or codes the initial layers of his paintings with a specific colour. He begins his process by blending pigments to create unique shades of paint. He mixes colour to create muted tones, sometimes fusing pigments with white and (or) black. Instead of making use of pigments’ pure and primary states, his mixture of tones is representational of how present-day participants of visual culture, consume, communicate, and understand colour. Now more than ever, Sayed thinks of his audience — colour seems to be the vanguard of current visual modernity. Colour is among one of the various entry points he uses as a method to direct a viewer. It is both a passage into his work and objective information. Within his painting, colour describes the temperature, intimacy, light, detail of figure, and contrast of space.


The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St Clair is an impactful resource for Sayed. In her book, St Clair explores the archived history of colour, and she conveys the distinct contexts of specific colour tones present throughout, media, art history, and design. She maintains that “a certain distaste for colour runs through Western culture like a ladder in a stocking. Many classical writers were dismissive. Colour was a distraction from the true glories of art: line and form. It was seen as self-indulgent and later, sinful: a sign of dissimulation and dishonesty” (29). As someone who is educated in academic painting, Sayed recounts there being a similar contempt of colour throughout his studies. There was a point during his education where he encountered the voices of texts, teachers, and peers who criticized the expressive use of colour as a critical tool in painting. Developing his process of colour became a method of resistance in his work, and a way to examine personal, as well as cultural history.


Sayed’s conscious colouration draws a viewer to consider habitual encounters and experiences of colour. He is often drawn to the popular ideas that surround certain colours, or the manner in which popular culture appropriates and assimilates the perception of particular colours into new histories (i.e Millennial Pink, or Emerald Green). Within Layercake, the evident companionship between colour and image gestures for viewers to harbour these sorts of reflections: How does colour communicate both aesthetically and conceptually? In what ways is colour representational of more than just aesthetic elements of design, image, and art? How does colour coordinate and communicate an understanding of specific place and time, and history? What exists beyond a colour’s surface?





St Clair, Kassia. The Secret Lives of Colour. London: John Murray (Publishers), 2018, pg. 27.

Suggested further readings from The Secret Lives of Colour are St Clair’s excerpts on the colours “Baker-Miller Pink” on page 119 and “Whitewash” on page 53.



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