Why a painter spent an entire year painting only in red, yellow and blue

In a small studio tucked behind a heritage terrace in Surry Hills, Sydney-based painter Marlowe Quigley made a decision that would reshape an entire year of work. From the first morning of January through the last frosty afternoon of December, every canvas that left the room contained only three pigments: a warm cadmium red, a sharp lemon yellow, and a deep ultramarine blue. No secondaries. No earth tones. No cheating with a tube of burnt sienna smuggled in under the bench. The constraint was total, deliberate, and deeply personal.

Restricting a palette is hardly new in the history of painting. Yves Klein had his blue, Mark Rothko pared his canvases down to glowing rectangles of almost nothing, and Agnes Martin worked for decades within whispers of grey and ochre. What Quigley wanted was something different. Rather than chasing a single colour mood, he wanted to relearn the fundamentals from scratch, the way a musician might return to scales after years of free improvisation. A year, he reasoned, was long enough to exhaust the obvious and short enough to keep the discipline from curdling into habit.

Living and working in Australia adds its own layer to such an experiment. The light here is famously changeable — crisp and bleached along the Bondi coast at seven in the morning, then amber and heavy by the time the ferries cut across Sydney Harbour in the late afternoon. Quigley found himself reading the sky in a new vocabulary, looking for hues that sat somewhere between his three pigments rather than beyond them.

Setting the rule and breaking old habits

The first decision was the easiest and the hardest. Quigley taped a hand-drawn chart above his easel — red at the top, yellow to the lower left, blue to the lower right — with a small note that read "no greens, no purples, no oranges." It looked almost childlike, the kind of diagram you might see pinned above a primary school art room in Newtown. And that, he said, was exactly the point. He wanted to feel the small humiliation of being a beginner again.

For the first six weeks, he worked in a tight, almost meditative loop. A sunrise over the Blue Mountains became a study of warm cadmium against cool ultramarine. A bowl of mangoes from the Adelaide Central Market became a meditation on the narrow band between yellow and orange — orange being precisely the colour he could not use. Friends visiting the studio would squint at the work and ask, quietly, whether he missed green. He did, intensely, but he wrote the longing down in a sketchbook rather than mixing it on the palette.

When the constraint began to bite

By late March, the project had stopped feeling clever. Quigley found himself avoiding subjects he could no longer render convincingly — the silver-green leaves of a coastal banksia, the wet grey of an inner Melbourne laneway after rain, the unmistakable blush of a Rosé from the Barossa Valley. He began driving out to Maroubra at dawn, then further to the sandstone cliffs of the Royal National Park, chasing compositions that could survive in his reduced range.

The discipline also reshaped his routine. He stopped drinking coffee in the studio, started painting only between sunrise and midday when the light was cool, and built long playlists to keep the room moving. Friends kept sending him tracks for the late hours, which eventually turned into a-playlist-for-late-night-painting-sessions on Mass Musings — a small but unexpected side-product of the experiment.

Mixing as a daily practice

Around the middle of the year, something shifted. Mixing stopped being a means to an end and became the work itself. Quigley began keeping a daily swatch book, marking down ratios the way a barista in Fitzroy might dial in a single-origin pour-over. Two parts red to one part blue produced a muddy maroon that, surprisingly, read as the deep brick of a Carlton terrace at dusk. A whisper of yellow into blue gave him the bruised grey of an overcast day in Hobart.

This was also when he started to feel the personality of the three pigments he had actually chosen. His red leaned warm, his yellow leaned acidic, his blue carried a violet undertone. Had he picked a true primary red, a clean spectrum yellow, and a greenish blue, his mixes would have skewed differently. The chromatic bias of the tubes on his bench mattered as much as the rule itself.

Pigment Emotional tone Mixing behaviour Surprise discovery
Cadmium red (warm) Heat, urgency, brick Drove mixes toward rust and brown when blended with blue A 3:1 ratio with blue gave the terracotta of a Footscray rooftop
Lemon yellow Sunlight, caution, sharpness Stayed luminous even when heavily diluted Paired with red, it produced the coral of a Bondi lifeguard tower
Ultramarine blue (deep) Distance, dusk, depth Tipped toward violet when mixed with red Thinned with medium, it read as the smoke over a Hobart winter fog

The Australian landscape, re-read

Quigley had not expected his homeland to feel quite so foreign. The ochre of the outback, which he had always taken for granted as a colour in its own right, turned out to be an elaborate negotiation between his yellow and red, with just enough blue to cool it down. The wet greens of the Daintree, glimpsed on a quick trip north in July, became almost unbearable to look at — a colour he had built an entire visual vocabulary around and was now, by rule, forbidden to mix.

He also noticed how Australian interiors demanded different solutions. The honey-coloured timbers of a Queenslander in Brisbane, the deep blue linoleum of a share-house kitchen in Collingwood, the warm terracotta floor of a Fremantle café — each of these required a patient, almost archaeological process of layering. He began to understand why so many Australian painters of the past had reached for ochre and oxide, and why restricting himself to primaries was, in its own quiet way, a critique of that national palette.

What worked and what fell apart

After twelve months, Quigley rolled the canvas off the final stretch and sat with the pile. Some pieces held up, others collapsed under their own ambition. He wrote down what he had learned in two simple lists.

What the project sharpened:

What he would change next time:

Why constraints still matter

Quigley is quick to say the year was not a stunt. He is suspicious of any project that announces itself with a press release and finishes with a slick gallery opening. The point, he insists, was to interrogate the comfortable habits he had developed over fifteen years of professional painting, and to come out the other side with a more honest, more alert relationship with colour.

In a country where the light itself behaves like a shifting collaborator — bleaching a Sydney terrace one moment, soaking a Perth verandah in gold the next — such a project carries a particular weight. Painters here have always had to negotiate the landscape on its own terms. Spending a year with only red, yellow, and blue, Quigley discovered, was less a limitation than a slow, careful translation of a country that never sits still.