Morocco Through My Eyes: The Journey That Changed My Palette Forever

There are places you visit. And then there are places that visit you that follow you home, settle into your subconscious, and start showing up in everything you make for years afterwards.

Morocco is that kind of place.

Landing in Casablanca

The assault on the senses is immediate.

The taxi from the airport drops you at the edge of the Medina and then, suddenly, you're inside it. The smell of spices and leather and rose water. The sound of a thousand conversations and a man shouting prices. Motorbikes and donkeys squeeze through a tiny lane way between the old walls that hold many stories.

It’s the colours that stay with you.

There's the famous red of the city walls, that particular dusty terracotta that seems to absorb the afternoon light and give it back warmer. But it's the details that stay with you: the geometric tiles in a courtyard: cobalt, cream, sage and black, intricate pattern. The bolts of fabric in a dyers' souk, hanging in great wet curtains of saffron and violet and the kind of deep, saturated pink that shouldn't work but absolutely does.

I stood in front of the textile market for a long time. Long enough that a stall owner brought me a glass of mint tea. We didn't share a language, but the rugs told the stories of times gone by.

Inside the Riads

Moroccan Riads are designed around a central courtyard often with a fountain, always with some form of garden, always a palm tree. They fold the outside world away. You step through an unmarked door in a plain wall and suddenly you're in a sanctuary of carved plaster, painted cedar, intricate zellij tilework and dappled light.

I stayed in a riad in the medina of Fez that had been in the same family for four generations. The owner's great grandmother had chosen the tiles in the courtyard. Her granddaughter served us breakfast in tiny tangines on a terrace strung with bougainvillea. The mint tea poured from a beautifully patterned pot.

That compression of time centuries of craft, taste, tradition and daily life layered in one building is something I've tried to bring into my Moroccan Collection. The sense that pattern is not decoration but language. That colour is not styling but part of the story.

The Souks: A Masterclass in Colour Theory

The spice stalls are arranged like something a painter dreamed, turmeric gold against paprika red and cumin brown, all lit from above by a sky framed between the rooftops. The ceramics section is a lesson in how to use bold geometric patterns on white backgrounds, the negative space as important as the mark.

The carpet sellers will unroll pieces in front of you that have taken months to make. Each one tells the story of the region it came from, the family who made it, the symbols that carry meaning across generations each shape telling a story.

I had to have one. It now lives on my studio floor. It's the first thing I see when I sit down to paint.

What Morocco Gave My Art

The Moroccan Collection came directly from those trips from the tiles, the textiles, the geometry, the light.

What I tried to capture wasn't photographic likeness but feeling. The feeling of being in a medina at dusk when the calls to prayer layer over each other and the light turns everything gold. The feeling of running your hand along a wall of handmade tiles and realising that someone, somewhere, made each individual piece. The Old patina walls.

The collection uses geometric pattern and a palette rooted in the real colours of Morocco saffron, cobalt, terracotta, ivory, deep forest green but filtered through my own eyes. Bold. Slightly maximalist. Joyful.

Because Morocco, for all its complexity, is one of the most joyful places I have ever been.

Bring Morocco Home

You don't need a flight to Casablanca to feel it.

The right print on the right wall can do something remarkable: it can shift the atmosphere of a room. Make it feel layered and travelled and full of stories. Make it feel like a place someone really lives not just sleeps.

That's what the Moroccan Collection is for.