October 17 - Arbitrary Color

When working from photographs, a painter can become so committed to an "accurate" portrayal of the scene that the rights of the painting go right over the cliff. Painters should be more concerned with the elements and principles of design than insisting that every detail of a particular place be factually rendered. The first element that an amateur painter seems preoccupied with is color. But why not make color the subject, and not the objects in the painting? Here are some paintings in which my color choices were arbitrary and based solely on my emotional response to certain color combinations. The houses were really white, the rocky ledges, gray and the trees were a uniform green. Play with arbitrary colors and both you and the viewer might get more excited about the scene.