Van Gogh and many other painters of his time were students of The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors and their Applications to the Arts (1839) by the famed French chemist M.E. Chevreul. Chevreul had blended colors by winding threads across a card in alternating hues. He discovered that when similar colors are alternated in this way, a brilliance resulted that could not be achieved by either of the colors alone.
 
Vincent's intention, then, was to sacrifice a solid color or a smoothly gradated color for a more brilliant effect by alternating two similar colors.
 
By assuming that Vincent did not know any better, we have failed to learn of a major component of his mission.
 
When we walk into a museum and are faced with a large canvas painted with a single bright color we may react to the work of Ellsworth Kelly by assuming that he was just another minimalist, or that he was reacting against representational art or traditional art in some petulant way. But Ellsworth Kelly was one of a group of soldiers who, in World War II, created highly representational mock-ups of tanks, airplanes, and other military equipment in order to fool German aerial reconnaissance. His drawings of flowers are gorgeous, he was certainly capable of making thoroughly convincing representational art.
 
We may not be able to completely understand the relationship between his military career and his artistic career, but knowing just that simple fact about Kelly adds another dimension to the question of his later choice to reject illusionalism. He was far from inept at it. I do not want to oversimplify and suggest that Kelly was merely reacting against the war. He was operating on a much higher level of competence and sophistication in his artistic decisions than simple knee-jerk reaction.
 
Regarding my own work I hope to hear not the vaguely judgmental comment, “That shouldn't work but strangely it does,” but instead the question, “Why did you do that?” to which I would hope to respond with an enlightened response. I, like most other artists, am not to be defined by my incompetencies.
​

​There was a bit performed on Saturday Night Live years ago in which Earthmen arrived on a distant planet populated by well-endowed women whose eyeballs were on the tips of their breasts. The well-behaved men addressed the women’s heads when one of the ladies scolded, “Hey! Our eyes are down here, Buster!”

I believe we have been trained to look politely at art with our eyes instead of our breasts, and here I refer to the heart, not the mammary.

Because as a young man I had more than twice allowed myself to be persuaded by self-appointed superior artists to completely change my direction, and even now still find myself susceptible to the least comment, positive or negative, I  found it helpful to work in seclusion. This made it really easy to work on anything, because nobody was ever going to see it—not for a while, anyway. 

I credit Roberta Murray with setting me off in this direction by posing the question, "How would I paint if nobody was going to see my work?" 

The new strategy worked well. I found it much easier to start paintings and to work them in a manner which would have been unfathomable in the past. It was not a perfect solution; I did still have to encourage myself in order to get started, but I managed to execute a handful of paintings that turned out to have higher meaning for me. My excitement in painting those harked back to the old days when painting was new and not yet fraught with the threat of put-downs.

Often enough my paintings reached a level above any I had attained before. The difference between these works and those previous is not earth-shattering at all; it may be barely visible to most people. To me the evolution was profound.
And yet still a negative voice inside me suggested, “These aren’t so great. They are not groundbreaking at all. You could see work of this stature in a magazine illustration.”

painter discovering that his new undertaking was outrageously successful, despite his pessimism. I believed of each painting that it was not my very best, and it usually wasn't. Though among my best, it did not yet have the conception or meaning to which I aspired. But okay.

​In one very important respect, however, each painting was a great success, because I did it. I overpowered my negative concerns and decided to paint it just to see what each one would look like.  That made the next one easier to take up.

One morning last week, while I was contemplating from my campsite a view across the lake in Tombigbee State Park, Mississippi, I remembered again the assignment I had overheard a professor give his class at the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in Arkansas two years ago. He charged his students to classify paintings as beautiful, picturesque, or sublime. That classification of images crosses my mind frequently, and I have revised it to make it more practical for the artist—me.
 
Some scenes are just as well represented by a photograph as by any other medium. These are the picturesque. When the point of the image is to present something interesting or unusual, I feel I might as well snap a photo as paint it.
 
Other views inspire me to represent them through my eyes, my head, my heart and my hands. The image that appears on the canvas will be abstracted from what I observe—a photograph will not do. My purpose as the go-between between scene and painting is to allow the image to pass through me and be influenced by its passage, from a starting point that might well be unremarkable. These sorts of paintings are the rare ones that satisfy me most, whether done by me or others.
 
But then there are vistas that are just outright stunning. It was such a panorama by which I was moved that morning at my campsite, and that morning I went one step further in my thought about the tripartite classification of images.
 
We artists believe, and we like to tell others, that we see ever so much more of a view when we render it in paint. But is that necessarily true? I looked hard at the colors in the trees across the water, noting the change in hue and value between the leaves above and the dark forest interior below. There now, wasn’t I seeing just as much as I would if I were painting? Of course I was. The only varying factor was my level of attention. Usually in the presence of beauty I just look and enjoy. I don’t resolve to see as intently as I would if I were painting—but I could. I can.
 
Then I realized that I desire of my viewers that they see deeply into my work, that they spend effort to see what I have put together. But wait! Didn’t we all at one time agree that the most thorough seeing came only with painting? So should the viewer paint a copy of our paintings? Some instructors do require of students that they spend time in museums making copies, but is it reasonable to expect all viewers to do that? (I was shocked and dismayed to see how little NYC museum attendees regard great works of art, flitting from one painting to the next clicking snapshots with their phones and moving on.)
 
No, I wish for my viewers to look with attention, and believe they can do so without painting or making any other heroic effort. As can I. I acknowledge that some views are best appreciated right now, with deep attention.
 
The rest of the way through Mississippi on the Natchez Trace Parkway I practiced seeing actively, without immediately thinking of painting or photographing. I arrived home with an enhanced sense of beauty, which I intend to nourish. My work in the studio this week is not necessarily improved, but I have certainly enjoyed it in a new way.