It is all about having a passion for color. This passion gives one an unlimited vocabulary. Color is use to create steps to direct the eye around the painting parallel to the vision of the artist. Along the way, like a song writer, rhyming words that do not really rhyme, we invent color relationships to get at the surprising juxtapositions that are found in nature. It is a way of staying excited, staying in love.
Color,
like drawing, is an abstraction. One color, just as one word in poetry,
needs to be found to stand in for several colors. Each color needs to
be chosen in consideration of the whole. Color does not become itself
until the whole work is completed. A painting that earlier in its
making resembled a poem, as it gets filled in, cluttered with too much
color that changes or dilutes what was there, loses its poetry. If a
painting isn’t working I find it is not because something is missing but
that there is something that is not needed and therefore hurtful. This
brings us back to love. Love colors as writers love words. It is the
love that comes through when the mind gets out of the way. Don’t think
too much. Trust your instincts. I try not to worry about what I do not
know, what I have been unable to teach myself. My inabilities serve me
better than my abilities. That art is not something that is learned and
then practiced, it is a form of communication and one is always trying
to say something clearer. To love and to be honest, maybe one does not
exist without the other and a desire to communicate that, this is what
it takes to make art. . . . .