More than two decades ago I did large abstractions on canvas and these you could call my "doodling" phase. I included a "crop" of such a large painting here. (This painting is now somewhere in Korea.) One thing that I learned during this period - or which was inevitable or "destined" for me to learn through my experimentation - was that darker tones give a painting balance and if something in a painting does not feel right, it is usually because the darker tones are missing.
It happened so many times that I felt a painting was "hanging", it was just not coming together and the remedy usually entailed adding the darker tones and most definitely always a little of that lamp or ivory black to bring harmony and to "anchor" the work. It is a little like life, I suppose. We do not want to think of the darker moments and the down-to-earth mundane ways that often seem to slow us down. However, these darker hues make our happiness look even more spectacular when we are aglow.
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