“Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another,
to cause vibrations in the soul.”
— Wassily Kandinsky

“Colour and I are one. I am a painter.”
–Paul Klee

“The craving for colour is a natural necessity just as for water and fire. Colour is a raw material indispensable to life. At every era of his existence and his history, the human being has associated colour with his joys, his actions and his pleasures.”
— Fernand Leger

“You put down one color and it calls for an answer. You have to look at it like a melody.”
–Romare Bearden

“Color! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams.”
–Paul Gauguin

and finally, from writer and artist Jules Feiffer,

“Artists can color the sky red because they know it’s blue. Those of us who aren’t artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we’re stupid.”
–Jules Feiffer

I include the Feiffer because it reminds me of a little story I heard from a grade school teacher who noticed a little boy coloring a picture with a pink and purple sky. The teacher stopped and explained to the boy that the sky was not pink or purple, it was blue.  The boy insisted on his colorful sky and the teacher insisted he was mistaken.  “Then,” she said, “when I was driving home that night just as the sun was setting, there before me was the most beautiful pink and purple sky!  I was the one who was mistaken.”

Let us take our lessons for art and life where we find them and never be too quick to judge or dismiss anything that makes someone else’s heart sing.

Make your sky any color you want!  At some moment on some day or night, it will be exactly right, and no one will think you’re stupid.

A new work.  Is that a green sky?