IS THERE SOME SIGNIFICANCE TO THE COLOR BLUE IN YOUR PAINTINGS?

I don't think of colors as signifying anything, but I do get crushes on them. I have been serially infatuated with Prussian blue, cerulean blue, ultramarine blue, and cobalt blue. For a while it was raw sienna, and then raw umber. I think I even wrote a poem to raw umber once, and spent months squinting my eyes at every shadow in a "find the umber" obsession. I found it everywhere.

I have had a longtime lust for cadmium red deep. It actually gives me a bit of an erotic charge to load up a brush with cadmium red and smooth it onto the canvas. Cadmium yellow is also a seductive color and is on my "to do" list. It's a hard color to use well in big swathes, and one of my future projects is to figure out how.

I also love the way oil paints smell. Strangely, so does Vito, my parrot, who will occasionally take it into his head to start ripping up brushes and tearing open tubes of paint. He knows quite well that this is bad behavior, so he scolds himself while he's doing it, muttering, "No, Vito, no! Bad bird!" with the evidence right there on his beak. I have to hold him on his back and wipe it out of his mouth with a rag. The first time he did it (at least twenty years ago) I was worried crazy, because I had read that cadmium is a deadly poison, but as far as I can tell, it's never even caused him an upset stomach.