HOW do you create "emotional force" from colour, asks Heworth artist Elaine Brown. "It comes from inside you; art has to come from the heart."

Elaine's responses to her heart's prompting are on show in her Captured Memories exhibition at Lucius Gallery, in Fossgate, York, where the light-toned stone floor and buff-coloured walls and lack of gallery clutter give full rein to the contemplative nature of her work.

Elaine, 37, calls her canvasses colourfields, taking her initial inspiration from her student days at St Martin's School of Art in London, when she would "disappear off for hours to sit and stare at Rothko's giant colour fields" at the Tate.

"Just one main wish motivates me in my work," she says. "That it stirs something in your soul every time, like Rothko did for me all those years ago."

After leaving college in 1989, Elaine put her artistic pursuits into cold storage for 15 years, instead focusing on a career in graphic design and on motherhood. The exhibition straddles that gap, featuring collages and figurative studies in pastel and graphite pencil from her introspective college days, and new colour-suffused abstract works that "pick up from where I left off".

"If I'd carried on painting 15 years ago, I don't think I'd be at this point now.

"The fact that I made the conscious decision not to paint because I didn't want it to be just a hobby means I can unleash in my art all the experiences I've had since college in my early twenties, when it's difficult to know where your feelings come from."

Captured Memories runs until February 26, and work is on sale at £50 to £270.

Updated: 15:59 Thursday, February 10, 2005