Baroque Emotion as a Gateway into Dramatic Colour
When I think about baroque emotion, I think of the way Baz Luhrmann lets colour behave like a living force—unafraid, unfiltered, and emotionally charged. His films taught me that a palette can feel like a heartbeat, that saturation can become a language, and that excess can reveal a deeper honesty. I grew up absorbing the theatrical glow of his worlds, letting them guide me toward my own chromatic tension. In my work, colour carries emotional gravity; it is not an accessory but a spell that alters the air of the composition. Dramatic colour became my way of articulating sensation, intuition, and the dream-coded layers beneath a moment.
Glitter and Glow as Emotional Frequency
Luhrmann’s glittering atmospheres—those shimmering golds and neon halos—showed me what happens when colour becomes a pulse instead of a backdrop. When I work with glowing hues, I often return to that sensorial logic. A luminous green can signal possibility, a dusk-toned magenta can hold a quiet ache, and a saturated red can serve as a threshold someone is afraid to cross. These choices are not decorative; they are talismanic. The glow I use across petals, seeds, and symbolic guardians mirrors the glittering excess that shaped my earliest sense of how emotion moves through colour.
Moulin Rouge and the Intimacy of Chromatic Tension
Moulin Rouge! revealed something essential to me: that colour is most powerful when it bears emotional contradiction. The tension between velvet-blacks and feverish reds, between pale moonlit tones and the rising heat of desire, taught me how to let hues collide without resolving their friction. In my work, I preserve this tension intentionally. A night-flower may bloom under a silver haze while a thorned curl flashes with ember-glow at its edges. That collision feels human to me—fragile and bold at the same time, like the emotional atmosphere of the film. Chromatic tension becomes a space where longing, fear, and revelation coexist.
Romeo + Juliet and the Sacredness of Saturation
Romeo + Juliet introduced me to a kind of sacred saturation that felt almost ritualistic. Colours arrived unsoftened, glowing like omens. There was nothing polite about them, nothing diluted. That unapologetic use of hue echoed something I was already beginning to sense in my own symbolic world—an instinct to paint emotion as it truly feels rather than as it is expected to appear. Saturation, in this sense, becomes a form of emotional clarity. A glowing seed or mirrored bloom can hold the fullness of an inner truth, even when words cannot.
The Great Gatsby and the Theatre of Atmosphere
In The Great Gatsby, the theatrical staging of colour—those sweeping golds, aqueous blues, and opalescent whites—made atmosphere feel almost architectural. It taught me how to use composition as a stage where colour performs. When I create botanical guardians rising from a haze of twilight grain, or petals that unfold like curtains around a central figure, I draw from this cinematic theatre. Luhrmann’s approach showed me that drama is not about spectacle; it is about emotional revelation. Dramatic colour becomes a kind of portal, a threshold where the internal world becomes visible.
Where Cinematic Excess Meets Botanical Myth
My work often lives at the intersection of cinematic intensity and botanical myth. Folklore from Slavic and Baltic traditions frequently uses flowers, roots, and moons to express emotions too vast for language. Luhrmann’s films echo that logic—lush, ritualistic, alive with symbolism. By blending his sensorial excess with my own mythic vocabulary, I create atmospheres where petals glow like omens, roots carry dream-coded signals, and colour becomes a carrier of fate. The baroque emotionality of his films gives me permission to push further into symbolic maximalism.
Dramatic Colour as a Form of Truth
Over time, I realised that my love for dramatic colour is not mere aesthetic preference; it is a way of accessing emotional truth. The deep greens, the ember-blush reds, the lunar violets—they feel like internal states translated visually. When I paint with such intensity, I am not exaggerating; I am being honest. Colour becomes a vessel for soul-weight, intuition, and the botanical logic that governs my inner landscapes. Luhrmann’s films helped me understand that emotion thrives in excess, and that dramatic colour—used with intention—can reveal more than muted tones ever could.
