Color--food for soul

I believe--but am not sure--it was May Sarton who said, "Color, like light, feeds the soul."  

I'm taking an online class by Louise Fletcher, an abstract painter, who has taught me so much in her free classes and You Tube videos.  Tonight's video, on color, blew some vibrant gold into my brain.

She demonstrates how with three shades or tints of primary colors (any red, any yellow, any blue) along with white and black, you can mix countless colors, "all of which harmonize with each other because they are all made of the same three primary colors."  

Our assignment for today is to take three colors we don't normally use (or like) and put a blob of each color on a palette, plus a blob of white and a blob of black.  "If you add white to a mixture, you get a tint of a color; if you add black, you get a shade."

Who knew?

Probably every one of you who paints knew that, but it's news to me!

This video inspired me to mix some colors (later, in daylight) and to search for words on color by painters, photographers, writers....

“When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their souls!”

- Ted Grant.

 “If one could only catch that true color of nature—the very thought of it drives me mad.”

- Andrew Wyeth.

“I found I could say things with colors that I couldn’t say any other way – things that I had no words for.”

- Georgia O Keeffe.

“If you see a tree as blue, then make it blue.”

- Paul Gauguin.

“All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.”

- Marc Chagall.