"I use about 20 different colours to retain the luminance in my work"

Dyer reveals a working method where an expansive palette safeguards brightness rather than diluting it. Luminance, the perceived lightness or brightness within a painting, is notoriously fragile in subtractive color mixing; combine too many pigments and the result tends toward neutral mud, absorbing light instead of reflecting it. By drawing on around twenty distinct hues, he can place clean, purposeful notes of color next to one another, letting the eye perform the blending optically. This preserves the sparkle of each pigment’s unique spectral character and keeps passages glowing.

A wide palette also provides fine control over temperature shifts. Warm and cool variants of similar hues, two blues, several reds, a range of greens, allow nuanced modulation without heavy mixing. Transparent pigments glaze to create depth and inner light; opaque ones deliver bold, sunlit planes. With multiple preselected options for each value step, he can map light and shadow accurately, protecting the painting’s tonal structure, which is essential to the sensation of luminance.

There’s a practical psychology to it as well. When each pigment carries a distinctive voice, color decisions become deliberate rather than compensatory. Instead of mixing to “fix” a color, he can choose an inherently luminous alternative. This reduces overworking, preserves surface freshness, and sustains the impression of air and sun. The approach aligns with traditions from Fauvism to Pointillism, where adjacency and purity of color are used to intensify light.

Contextually, Dyer’s subjects, often coastal and botanical, demand radiance. Atlantic light, glittering seas, and saturated flora ask for a palette that can echo outdoor brilliance without collapsing into glare. Twenty colors enable harmonic chords: complements for vibration, near-complements for quiet, and subtle tertiaries that still breathe. The result is a visual music in which brightness is not merely high contrast but a felt luminosity, achieved by respecting pigment integrity, organizing value relationships, and trusting the eye’s capacity to merge discrete notes into living light.