Brighter Days

I’m a sucker for a bright colour combination, leaving me less than enthused about Pantone’s colour of the year for 2025, an “evocative soft brown” they’re calling Mocha Mousse. I think they should drop an ‘s’ and call it Mocha Mouse.

The colours in the screen grab here are from Samia Halaby’s kinetic painting Spooling Up (1988) featured at Tate Modern’s Electric Dreams exhibition. The other brightly coloured painting that immediately drew me in was in the opening room: Work, by Japanese artist Atsuko Tanaka, reproduced for this Tate art print here.

Overall, Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet made me feel nostalgic, longing for a past era when experimentation felt innocent and original. For all the power of technology today things are feeling generic, even perhaps, a little Mocha Mouse…Mousse sorry.

Is the trend to passive and held back because there’s so much uncertainty around?

On looking both artists up I was happy to discover that they were women working their magic with colour. Etel Adnan is another woman artist I love who produces incredible colours and works with them in brilliant ways.