Close your eyes and press your palms to your sockets. What do you see? Wait a few moments and a micro-universe begins to emerge, flickering in shades of red, green and violet. That private cinema of colour and shape was the jumping-off point for Full Spectrum, Daniel Eatock’s new short film created for Winsor & Newton and directed by Maria Lax.
London-based artist Eatock has long been fascinated by the quiet poetry of materials. Before brush meets canvas, he finds himself captivated by the simple fact of paint sealed in a tube. “Colour is already suspended in a vessel,” he says. “My goal is to free it from that constraint, to let it find its own shape.” In Full Spectrum, the medium of film becomes part of that liberation, keeping colour alive in its undried, ever-shifting state.
The result is not so much a moving painting as it is a sequence of unfolding chromatic events. Paired with narration that evokes sounds of colours – musical references range from Blue Monday and Pink Floyd to Black Flag and Yellow Submarine – the film doubles as an aural experience. According to Eatock, the soundtrack acts like “audio subtitles”, guiding the ear to see in tandem with the eye.
Paradoxically, Eatock also describes colour as restrictive, pointing to what the film cannot deliver: texture, smell, “the brittleness of blue, or the scent of purple”. Freed from those physical cues, Full Spectrum is at once a cosmic and cellular spectacle. It is, he says, “both super-massive like a distant galaxy or like an embryo that is growing.”
The film is like two mirrors facing each other – an infinite spectrum of meanings and colours
For Eatock, painting has never been about creating illusions of reality. Instead, he seeks to emphasise the flatness of the surface, letting paint itself determine form. “It’s like the magician showing how the trick is done,” he explains. Shapes emerge from rolling colour flat, with hue simply serving to differentiate one form from another – “like the section dividers in a Filofax”.
Having long used Winsor & Newton materials for his paintings, Eatock was delighted when the brand approached him. It’s a partnership that exemplifies Winsor & Newton’s longstanding commitment to innovation and artistic exploration, bringing the brand’s philosophy to life by celebrating the transformative power of colour and the creative process itself.
The addition of Finnish filmmaker Lax brought what Eatock calls “a special lens” to the project. “She has her own understanding of colour that is outwardly different from mine,” he says. He likens her work, which utilises macro cinematography and analogue techniques, to aurora borealis in how it “captures the radiating colour of emotions”.
Emotion runs through the film in other ways as well. Without over-explaining, Eatock acknowledges that certain hues come loaded with cultural shorthand: red mist, green with envy and so on. These quick-fire associations ripple through the film, moving seamlessly between personal memory and collective meaning.
Produced in partnership with Art Practice as part of Winsor & Newton’s ongoing Galeria Acrylics campaign, Eatock views the film as a trailer that “builds anticipation for a new perspective for forms of colour”. Whether a full-length version will follow remains deliberately ambiguous. For now, he hopes viewers will draw their own interpretations from the film’s “infinite spectrum of meanings and colours”.
