A Geography of Colour

Ruth Philo

Art podcast with contemporary painters talking about their relationship with colour with painter Ruth Philo https://www.ruthphilo.co.uk/a-geography-of-colour.html @ageographyofcolour

  1. Aaron Kudi

    FEB 10

    Aaron Kudi

    Aaron Kudi is a contemporary painter, born in Bauchi, Nigeria, he lives and works in London. He grew up between Nigeria and London and Devon in the UK. He has a BSc in Psychology from London Metropolitan University, an MSc in Psychology from University College London and worked as a sculptor before becoming a painter. Aaron has undertaken residencies at Thread, Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, Senegal, 2024 and the British School at Rome, 2025. He is currently studying in the second year of an MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Aaron’s practice explores aspects of human experience and consciousness in relation to our contemporary world. His paintings are abstract with echoes of figuration. Combining gesture, colour and surface, Aaron explores the materiality of paint to evoke sensations of the immaterial, with both a sense of intimacy and unease. He says ‘I’ve come to think of painting as a kind of tending a slow, sometimes painful cultivation of what must grow and what must go. My own garden has been seeded by many things: the faith and science that lived side by side in my childhood home, the Nigerian Pentecostal rhythm of prayer and praise, the analytical precision of my father’s scientific mind, and the layered questions of belonging that come with moving between cultures. These early contradictions planted a fascination with dualities: control and surrender, knowing and feeling, faith and doubt. My painting practice, at its core, lives in the space between those states, between what I intend and what I could never fully control.’

    44 min
  2. Jo Hummel

    JAN 13

    Jo Hummel

    Jo Hummel is a contemporary British painter who lives and works on the Isle of Wight. She trained at the Royal College of Art and has established an international exhibition profile across the UK, Europe, the United States and South Africa. Her work is rooted in reductionism, using symbols and sacred geometry and engages with ancient spiritual concepts such as Sunya, the Sanskrit term for void and infinity, concerning the balance between emptiness and possibility. Colour assumes a pivotal role in Jo’s work, valued both for its subjective sensory impact and its psychologically transcendent qualities. Jo works with paper, collaging to create paintings through a careful balance of shape, colour, form, and material. Jo has had several solo shows including Stars Wrapped in Skin at Victor Lope Contemporaneo, Barcelona (2025), Looking Out, Barnard Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa 2023, Somewhere Here, But Far Away, 45 Park Lane, London, 2023 and two person shows at Gruin Gallery, Los Angeles and Fold Gallery, London. Her work has been shown in major group exhibitions including Flowers Gallery, London, Interface at Lille Grand Palais, Art Karlsruhe, Germany, the London Art Fair and the 53rd Venice Biennale. Her paintings are held in various collections including Christian Dior, Clintons, London, the Kilburn Foundation (Cape Town), LinkedIn London Headquarters, and The Shelborne Hotel, Miami Beach. Jo has received several grants from Arts Council England, including a DYCP Award in 2024. She is represented by The Tagli (London), Macadam Gallery (Brussels), Víctor Lope Contemporaneo (Barcelona), and Amelie du Chalard (Paris/New York). In Spring 2026 Jo will be Artist in Residence at Thread, Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, Senegal and in May 2026 she has a solo exhibition at Benjamin Eck Gallery, Munich.

    36 min
  3. Ruth Calland

    02/26/2024

    Ruth Calland

    Ruth Calland is a contemporary British painter, and also a Jungian analyst, ilving and working in London. Emergence and attunement to what is emergent, are the experiences that engage her. She has a deep interest in alchemy, which provides a framework for how she thinks about painting as process. She will often utilise two different points of reference and see them as creating an interactive field, within which she operates in order to investigate their relationship. She has a longstanding interest in gender, and her exploration of gender fluidity in her participative performance project Carnival of Souls took place across the E17 Arts Festival and the Folkestone Triennial in 2013. She presented this work at the conference ‘Alchemy: Exploring Metaphorical Transformations and Arts-Based Research’ at Oxford University in 2023. In the pandemic she was inspired by the early vampire film Nosferatu, with its monochrome landscapes, haunted by anxiety about infection by the supernatural other. At this time she also began researching trans experiences of being feared and othered, discussed by creators on TikTok. Her current work uses stills from these videos to amplify and celebrate trans voices, using high key colour to celebrate their cultural emergence from the shadows, and a redefinition of what it means to be natural, or true to nature.  Ruth is a member of Contemporary British Painting and has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Transition Gallery, Flowers East, Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery, Vestry House Museum, Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, and the Dulwich Festival. She has curated shows for APT, Walthamstow Wetlands, and Salthouse Gallery. She was included in the Made In Britain, 80 Painters of the 21st Century, at Yantai Museum, Nanjing and Tianjin in China, and Gdansk, Poland in 2019; she was selected for the New Contemporaries at the ICA and Bluecoat Galleries, was a prize-winner at Southwark Gallery Open, Painting Fellow at Gloucester Art College, a Rome Scholar runner up, Boise Travelling Scholarship winner, and included twice in the Marmite Prize for Painting. In 2022 she was artist in residence atPasture Project Space, Sudbury andrecently a finalist at the Artworks Open 2023, (Barbican Arts Trust). She lectures and writes on creative processes within Jungian psychoanalysis and in 2018 won the Fordham Prize for her paper ‘Race, Power and Intimacy’.  website: www.ruthcalland.com https://www.ruthphilo.co.uk/a-geography-of-colour.html

    49 min
  4. Marius von Brasch

    11/24/2023

    Marius von Brasch

    Marius von Brasch is German-British painter who lives and works on the Isle of Wight. His work highlights the power of unconscious filters that shape perception. Imagination, affects and memories, which pervade social life, history and the life of the soul, play a significant role in the emergence of each painting and work on paper. Marius’s practice aims to translate these layers and their different relationships to time. The emotional dynamics of colour and how to contain and give form to what seems to evade representation are central to the work. Figures and fragmented narratives in the paintings constellate multiple polarities and also, often echoing mythologies, deal with ideological postures prevalent today. He finds parallels to his approach in Renaissance illuminations in alchemical manuscripts and quotes them indirectly in his work. This symbolic alchemical imagery addresses journeys of identities and evolution of consciousness while proposing transformative ways of working with conflict and diversity. Marius’s interest here is to find new painterly ways to speak about these subjects and a dialogue with classical and contemporary painting allows him to be part of an ongoing living tradition. Marius received his MA with distinction from Winchester School of Art (Uni of Southampton) where he also completed his practice-based PhD in Fine Art Painting. He was awarded the Abbey Fellowship in Painting at The British School in Rome in 2013. With a background in psychotherapy and literature, Marius teaches experiential approaches to painting as well as courses on art and literature. His work is held in the Priseman Seabrook Collection, the University of Essex Modern and Contemporary British Art Collection, and in international private collections. He is represented by Jenn Singer Gallery, New York. Links: http://www.mariusvonbrasch.co.uk https://www.ruthphilo.co.uk/a-geography-of-colour.html Instagram @mariusvonbrasch Facebook https://www.facebook.com/mariusvonbrasch Jenn Singer Gallery http://jennsingergallery.com/mariusvonbrasch Book links: James Hillman, The Dream and The Underworld Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

    52 min

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Art podcast with contemporary painters talking about their relationship with colour with painter Ruth Philo https://www.ruthphilo.co.uk/a-geography-of-colour.html @ageographyofcolour

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