the darkness

Amazingly...I have been painting in fairly monochromatic colour schemes over the last bit. The latest is syrupy dark black sepia coloured ranging into white and black with grey. 

The other day I did a painting and low and behold....GREEN appeared. It was kinda scary. It intrigued me and felt rightly wrong and lovely all at once.

Over the years, most of what people say about the work I do is "it is so dark", or "you should use more colour" or blah. Well, interestingly the colour that I always have used most of is white and black you only need bit anyway. I was reading about the Austrian artist Hundertwasser the other day....here's what someone said:

"...black is not the same as darkness, black is a vibrant colour fully the equal of any other hue. Darkness, rather, is the depression of the colour scheme to the lowest values...abscence of colour is not the same as lack of light". 

Hundertwasser had a psuedonym or philosophy of 'dunkelbunt': dark colourful or "a darkness consistning of the greatest possible concentration of saturated colours, glowing out of an endless depth..." 

So there...a huge sigh of colourful relief and validation that the darkness illuminates....which reminds me of the black feathers of crows. They are black and full of all colour, but secretly underneath the down feathers of all crows is white.