Chroma Cues™ is a pack of ninety-nine cards created by Lisa Marie Hall designed to inspire an alternative approach to colour and how we use our senses to experience the world around us.

In February 2016, 200 packs were sent out as gifts to creative minds all across the world – teachers, students, writers, designers, musicians and dancers – a thank you for inspiring the work & lives of others – a gift that shares a love of colour.  Each recipient could use it to spark a new idea or hand it down to a student or child to brighten their appreciation of the chromatic world they live in.  The gift required no response except for chosen creative minds to go on to share the way they experience colour and expand the dialogue on the subject.

Chroma Cues™ was designed for creative minds who practically explore colour in art, design, craft, fashion, moving image, performance and architecture.  The pack of cards would look best on a desk surrounded by materials and books and beginnings of ideas – close at hand when a spark is needed. The cues aim to encourage lateral looking and self-learning on the subject of colour.  Each maxim can be interpreted differently by the user each time it’s read.  The words are a mixture of simple instructions (“Saturate – Desaturate“), questions (“Where does blue live?“), poetic musings (“Light the fire of rust“), and prompts to investigate (“Out on the wine-dark sea“).

If inspired, one can fill in the form on Your Colour page and leave thoughts on ‘what colour is’ to be shared online to inspire others.  It is hoped this will be the start of the second edition of Chroma Cues™.

Each pack is hand-painted and contains photographs taken by Lisa from around the world over the last decade: the monuments of Rome, fishermen’s houses in Goa, the streets of London, Berlin, Barcelona, Tokyo & New York, the souks of Morocco, the history of Liverpool and Sheffield, and the ancient glaciers of Greenland.  These collected images have been part of Lisa’s own colour education and taught her to use her whole body to experience colour.  The first edition of Chroma Cues™ is inspired by George Brecht’s book Water Yam (1963) and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies (1975) and it radiates the ideas of pioneers in colour studies including David Batchelor, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and John Ruskin.

Colour is a living character who appears to each human eye as someone new. To bring colour to your work you must get to know this character – how it moves and sounds, how it feels, its rituals and language, listening to its stories, playing with it in the sun and the shadows, watching it grow old and begin again. Like the artist, it uses all its senses, and defies being trapped in theories that talk only to the eyes. Go, journey together, and come to know colour as you know yourself.

All images copyrighted to Lisa Marie Hall 2015, Chroma Cues is a registered trademark.