Colors and friends

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I've been having a lot of thoughts lately, as I'm driving, as I'm painting - and when I explore them, question them, jostle them, I find new treasures, new values, and what's important to me. Watercolor teaches me about life, and life teaches me about watercolor.

I was doing a floral and put down some watery yellow, and while it was wet, charged in a new color - Daniel Smith's Anthraquinoid Scarlet, a red-orange - and it did something quite unexpected. It brutally pushed the yellow out of the way, instead of mingling with it gently, and I watched it happen - a matter of seconds - the violence of it still shocks me. I know I'm just talking about colors.  :-)
But then I thought - we get so annoyed when friends and people do unexpected things, and we carry a grudge, and want things to change - instead of just accepting it, just learning that that is their property, like this AQ Scarlet had this bully-ish property - what can you do about that? Talk to it and tell it to be gentler with the yellow? Similarly, accept the properties of friends, find a new sustainable level of interaction that works with what you know about the person, and what is their innate nature. The other choice is to not use the color at all, not interact with someone. Yet I find that I want to use that color more now that I know what it sneakily does, and I will learn it to the point that it will work for me, and the unexpected will be less unexpected.

Here are some quick studies of irises (without any AQ Scarlet!) - the first 3 are direct paintings, no pencil drawing first - very freeing.

  


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