Colour is exciting, refreshing, joyful, and fulfilling. The trick is to get it right, on track with the right feelings, textures, subjects, and ideas. The key word is exciting, which is not to be confused with chaotic enthusiasm. It’s more thrilling than that, the soul-saturating fullness of completeness. Great colour is quiet exuberance!
It arrives almost before the painting does, with some unexplainable ping of recognition in a subject, a view, a stream of light, a visual event, or a vision. Then it has to get carried into the painting, the process, the choices of colour, the concentration, the exclusion of all distractions, until the painting itself works as a total event on its own. Quite something to achieve!