It has long been a maxim of painting that strong contrasts of light and dark enhance drama while bright, pretty colors are proper to happy, sweet feelings, what the French called “lyrical” and characteristic of say, Impressionism.

One way to limit a pallete is simply to cut the high saturation colors by mixing them with their complements or grays. White and black both kill color, so highly colorful pieces have to use a narrow range of tones. The emotional impact is achieved by the heightened drama of the light dark relationships — what I call emphasis on tone, eschewing as I do the word “values” in this context.

I am sure you’ve achieved this in your own work, for the parallels in photography are virtually identical.

After viewing your “Mirror” painting last week I made the comment that I was particularly drawn to the mother-child (as two separate persons) relationship. It seems to me a wonderful, contemporary topic. After reading BZ’s response and then, yours, I thought I should look again at the work to see what I had missed. Although it is not entirely clear to me in the above image (because of its very small size), I was quite startled to see that the “baby” in “Mirror” was a toy or, more specifically, a doll. Obviously, that matters and I was apologizing for my poor viewership.

I was critical of PB earlier for asking viewers to look at so many images. I suppose I should apolgize to him and instead simply recognize that, for me, looking at art is hard and time-consuming and exhausting and sometimes, frustrating and sometimes, exhilarating.

Apologies.

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Way back. Way way back… in college, I wrote a paper about a painting by Barnett Newman. It was called (appx.) “Who is afraid of Blue, Yellow and Red.” As I saw it only in reproduction, it was clearly a black and white painting. I remember attempting to promote BN as rethinking his “zips” in a more playful manner, a retreat from the more ambitious reading of his work as High Creativity (“Atonement”). I got a good grade along with the surpising revelation that the painting was not black, white and grey, but really blue, yellow and red.

I share this because, I never noticed that your babies were toys.

Apologies.