I’ve spent my life neck-deep in colour. Not in some pastel, abstract sense, but in the real stuff: grit, oil, powdered minerals from the edge of the Earth. Looking back, it feels like destiny, but it wasn’t. It was more a surreal series of accidents, bloodlines, missteps, lucky breaks, and one stubborn obsession: turning dirt into something transcendent.
My old man was an advertising illustrator. Our house was a mess of paint tubes, boards and the sweet bite of turpentine. On school holidays, my brother and I would ride the train with him into London, to this dusty five-storey Victorian pile near Covent Garden, carved up into studios packed with painters, writers and agents. That building’s gone now. Another ghost under the cobblestones.
But one trip changed everything. Dad took me to Cornelissen & Son, that old temple to art supplies tucked into Great Queen Street since 1863. The moment I stepped inside, it hit me like a shot: thick air soaked with linseed oil, canvas dust, and some ancient, resinous perfume that spoke of monasteries, ship holds, and spice caravans. There were shelves, like altars, lined with glass jars, each one a relic: gamboge, sandarac, terre verte, elemi, copaiba balsam. They whispered to me. Told stories of far-off places. Seduced me with the promise of alchemy.
Back home in my quiet country town, I started working in the family art supply store. I was painting already, clumsy but desperate to learn. That place became my first lab. I was given a set of pigments, tiny jars of powdered fire. That was it. Hooked. Colour wasn’t just colour. It was a language, a religion, a drug.
At eighteen, I lit the fuse, I was off to Bristol Art College. Back then, in the early ’80s, painting was crawling out of the grave, pissed off and loud. We were part of the revival. We didn’t just paint, we made everything. Stretchers, grounds, glues, paints. Some of us cooked wax for encaustic, others simmered rabbit-skin glue in rusty tins for distemper. We weren’t just students, we were a link in a chain stretching back to the Renaissance. This wasn’t school. It was initiation.
After college, I moved to London and, somehow, call it fate or just a full-circle moment, landed a job at Cornelissen’s. More than a decade after that first visit, I was back on that oil-stained floor. But this time, behind the counter. Cornelissen’s was no joke. You didn’t bluff your way there. You learned. You earned your stripes. You talked shop with pigment grinders, gilders, fresco experts, madmen who cooked their own oil from locally grown linseed.
The more I learned, the deeper I sank. At night, I was back in my studio like some apothecary lunatic, boiling resins, dissolving copals, grinding lapis to dust. I was making paint the way they did when Michelangelo was still sketching in charcoal. It wasn’t nostalgia. It was devotion.
That’s when I knew: this wasn’t just a job or a hobby. It was a life. My life. To chase colour from raw earth to radiant paint. To dig into its history, its science, its soul.
In 1992, I packed up my life and moved to Australia. No grand plan. No investors. Just a hunger to build something real. Something rooted in colour, craft, and a refusal to compromise. I started small. Langridge Artist Colours wasn’t some slick startup. It was me, a few sacks of pigment, some oil mediums I cooked myself, and a handful of artists in Melbourne who gave a damn.
The first “factory” was a busted-up joint on Langridge Street in Collingwood. It looked like a place you’d strip engines, not make paint. But it had four walls, a roof, and a name. For the first twelve years, I scraped by. No money, no machinery. Just sweat equity and the slow, brutal accumulation of tools. Every dollar I made got squirrelled away for a paint mill: because until you can grind your own colour, you’re just playing dress-up.
Then, in ’99, I got my hands on a double-roll mill. Basic. Crude. But it was a start. Four years later, after scraping together every cent, I bought a small triple-roll mill. That’s when things got serious. There’s no school for this kind of thing. No “Paint-Making 101” at your local TAFE. And I wasn’t about to beg for a seat at someone else’s table. I wanted to earn it. So I did what true believers do: I went to war with the process.
Ten-hour milling sessions. Paints that failed. Paints that turned out weird. Paints that made you want to cry, then scream, then try again. Dioxazine violet, this psychotic, punch-you-in-the-face purple, took months to get right. When it came out of the tube, it was so saturated it looked black. That’s when I knew I was on the right track. Things got better when I scored a monster: an old granite-faced Lehmann triple-roll mill, fifty years old and built like a Soviet tank. Suddenly, we were in business.
In 2004, we moved west to a bigger space in Yarraville. More room. More noise. More risk. That’s where the real evolution began. The following year, we finally released our oil paint line to the world. No half-measures. Just the stuff I’d been bleeding over for more than a decade.
As the years rolled on, we started doing what I’d always dreamed of: creating our own colours. Not imitations. Not nostalgia. Something uniquely Australian. The light down here is savage. Unforgiving. It doesn’t caress, it scorches. Colours vibrate with a kind of manic energy. We wanted to capture that: translate sunlight into pigment. And we did.
In 2024, riding high on the success of our oil paint, we kicked the door open with our own line of acrylics. Same obsession with detail. Same punch of colour. Same feel under the brush. Built not just to compete but to stake a claim. We aren’t just adding to the shelf. We’re out to make a difference.
After nearly forty years of chasing colour, I’m still not over it. Not even close. It’s a drug. Some pigments come with stories older than empires. Others are new, born in a lab, glowing like radioactive jewels. Either way, that thrill, the hit, never fades. And thank God for that.