Loose Color

6/10/20 View from our upstairs deck

6/10/20 Maple Leaf neighborhood

After trying the “don’t think” exercise prompted by USk Japan, I was amused by its unintended result: The challenge freed me from realistic colors. Although I’ve been pushing myself on and off for years to interpret colors more loosely (last year’s red/blue value studies were my most recent attempts), it doesn’t come easily. My default setting is to interpret colors literally, often to my own annoyance. (I so admire artists like Eleanor Doughty and Anne Rose Oosterbaan, whose natural styles are to interpret hues that seem to elude my imagination.)

Anyway, I had so much fun with that sketch that the next day I tried it during my morning walk (at right) and then again from our upstairs deck (above). Both views are so overly familiar (let’s go ahead and call them blah) that I needed a fresh way to approach them. This color thing is going in my toolkit permanently to help me see past the blah. Maybe interpreting color more freely will eventually come more easily to me.