It is understood by many artists that New Mexico gives us a special light. This painting is my interpretation of that light. All of the colors in this painting are found in New Mexico. Just not all in the same scene, but I have owned my artistic license for many years, and not afraid to use it! These colors are born out of many witnessed sunsets, walks on a dirt road after the rains, and adobe courtyards with carefully planted flowers and sparkling fountains.
Yesterday, while traveling home under partly cloudy skies full of cumulus clouds that might develop into rain, conditions lit up the skies with that particular glow that painters and photographers love. We are in the Monsoon season now, and great drenching rains have given us green plants and grasses growing again in profusion in this high desert land.
Suddenly I began to notice swaths of a new color out in the open fields and hills, a bright yellow green I’d call citron green. New grasses were springing up, and wild clumping grasses were beginning to show their coming tiny yellow blossoms. Was that glowing color a trick of the special light? In the far distant mountain range, the usual light blue took on a slightly turquoise tint instead of a normal flat blue/gray. I resolved to go home and mix up a special palette with these colors, like an ingredient recipe.
I collect colors in my brain the way woodworkers collect tools or cooks collect kitchen gadgets. At times on the road I have seen a landscape and named the various hues, hoping to commit them all to memory before I got home, for a future painting. A good exercise in paying attention to nature, try it sometime, fellow painters!
I used to work for quilting magazines and came away with piles of donated fabrics I eventually sorted into bins by color for future projects. The fun part of working with quilting fabric is pulling out the pieces and combining them into a wonderful palette of color groupings. Boom! Into the memory bank for use in new paintings too.
Collecting color is even better than collecting blue pottery bowls, my fun little side activity. Maybe that sprang out of a personal love of the color blue or a desire to collect some special little hand made things I can use day to day.
Do you collect color?
Hue Bliss: Color & Art notes by Karen Gillis Taylor 