Listening to Colour
Listening to Colour: The Paintings of Lillian Presthus
Essay by Joe Lam
The first time I encountered Lillian Presthus’s work — albeit from a distance — I was struck by a feeling I didn’t quite expect. The paintings didn’t rush forward, or explain themselves. They simply held their ground. Instead, I found myself slowing down. Listening. It was as if colour itself had taken a breath.
Some artists paint the world they see. Others, like Presthus, seem to paint not just what is seen, but what echoes between forms; what isn’t said — the hesitations, the pauses, the questions. Her works unfold as if in dialogue with the elemental voice of colour itself, testing its edges, allowing its tones to rise and settle without insistence.
Her latest paintings, continuing her Into the Blue series, deepen a process she has been exploring for years. What once felt like a solitary meditation on blue has begun to open outward, expanding. Blue is still here, but it no longer speaks alone. Other colours have entered the room and the conversation has started to change. Layer by layer, hue by hue, the paintings begin to feel less like a monologue and more like a gathering of voices — a gentle but insistent unfolding of something richer.
From Seeing to Sensing: The Resonance of Colour
Presthus often describes colour as having resonance, like music. It is not merely visual, but tonal — something that can be read, but also felt. Some paintings hum softly. Others move like memory: in waves, in pulses. Light and heavy. Rest and crescendo.
This musicality is more than a metaphor. You can sense it in the way her new paintings — each owning its own colour — have come together as if in conference. In the way one colour leans into another, in the patterns of nature and life she infuses into each painting — in the rhythm that emerges through repetition.
Step back, and you can tell that composition, for Presthus, feels less like arrangement and more like orchestration. Each canvas holds its own movement. Together, they begin to sound like something symphonic.
A Language without Words
This sensitivity carries into how the works are placed in space. Some hold light; others seem to withdraw from it. Some advance; others recede. The relationship between paintings is never fixed. Patterns — drawn from nature and the man-made world — emerge, wander, return. A circle may appear more than once — but it never quite lands the same way twice.
This sense of searching is part of the work’s quiet insistence. Like the circles in several of her works, it never quite closes. It invites revisiting. It reminds us that seeing isn’t linear. We loop back to certain shapes, certain thoughts, certain tones — not because they make sense, but because they linger.
Even the frame sizes shift our attention. Small works pull us in. Larger ones ask us to breathe with them. The result is not simply an exhibition, but a finely tuned experience — something composed, but not choreographed. Something alive to pace and pause.
Composing in Light and Form
Presthus works primarily with mineral-based pigments — a choice that feels aligned with her sensibility. As the Renaissance painters discovered, these pigments have an earthy, diffused luminosity that holds light without gloss, allowing colour to behave with a kind of quiet integrity. It changes with the hour. It waits to be seen again.
And so she builds and removes layers, some settle deep into the weave of the canvas; others remain suspended, like a breath just before its release. The effect is subtle, but mesmerising. There is a slow rhythm to it — one that makes you look again, and then differently.
I found myself thinking, briefly, of Rothko. Not in terms of style or surface, but in sensation — that same sense of being drawn inward by colour until it becomes less a thing you see and more a state you enter. A moment held.
A Voice of Restraint
Presthus’s paintings ask very little of the viewer. They don’t instruct. They don’t argue. And yet they give — generously, if you’re willing to slow down.
Their power lies in restraint. In how much they let things be. In the space they offer us to feel before we decide what it means. Her compositions speak in pulses, not proclamations. They are not statements but questions.
What happens when a colour begins to hold feeling? When a surface remembers? When pattern stirs recognition?
These questions seem folded into her work — into its layers, its rhythms, its silences.
The Conversation Continues
Across this series, it’s clear the artist is still circling something — still testing the weight of colour, the arc of a thought not yet complete. Still asking what happens when process leads, and form follows.
So Investigating Colour is not an exploration of something new. It is the continuation of an inquiry still unresolved. A deepening. A practice of circling back. Of noticing what holds, and what changes. Of paying attention not only to what we see, but how we see — and what we might sense in the quiet space as our perception shifts.
Perhaps that’s why these paintings linger in my mind. They leave space not for answers, but for something deeper. For resonance — for what we hear and feel when we let colour speak, softly and in its own time.
