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When I started painting again in 2001 I was determined to master the subject of colour which in the past I had found bewildering. I ended up creating a set of set of nine hundred colour samples (although a couple of thousand would have been better) I find these invaluable, both in the field and in the studio. Although I still have much to learn, I find I can now navigate through the subject of colour with growing certainty.
The rigorous analysis of colour has benefits similar to that of disciplined drawing; the intense study of nature educates the artist in the variety and subtlety of effects achievable through colour and line. Nature is not capable of being banal, this seems to be an exclusively human characteristic.
Anyone who has attempted to paint seriously will appreciate how much this medium punishes the artist for any weaknesses. Our weaknesses don't just make a work seem poor, but almost humiliatingly naive and clumsy. This tends to create an anxious urgency to find answers to such problems as composition, colour balance, pictorial interest, unity of style and the reduction of detail.
Standard solutions are seized upon but possibly at a cost. Once we are gripped by these solutions, we find the wonderful sense of endless freedom that a blank canvas seemed to represent becoming obliterated by the conventions that we were, for a while, so grateful for.
For this reason I am relatively laid back about the aforementioned problems. I still recognise their importance but I hope for solutions to arrive through experience and in a way that results in the solutions fitting in around my main concern of self-expression.
Dec 2008
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