Robert, Victoria, Yes, each picture is an experiment. This painting: Mother And Child, I set out to do it without greys nor blacks, to see what transpired and what I got, was a very luminous picture. All I wanted to have was a rainbow palette, of greens, violets, blues and yellows which are all high key colours. Blacks and greys have a lot of weight in a picture, so I do use black but sparingly and isolated from my very colourful compositions, like when I used it as a background for the yellow daffodils in order to achieve luminous flowers. ( dark against light )

I use black with respect and a great deal of care, and only for effect. Greys are easy to use, in the sense that if you become stumped with a colour harmony, you can always put grey on it, and it will balance any picture, it is, the easy way out.

My Spanish teacher Don Rafael Martinez Diaz, loved the colour grey, he thought grey was elegant. But in the end... it is what you FEEL about a colour, what really counts, and if greys make me sad, there is no point in using it, is there ? In the end a picture for me, it should bring happiness not sadness to have it hanging from your wall and I would not dream of having a grey picture hanging from my walls, when all I can see here, is grey skies, grey stone houses with grey roofs ! so something colourful its me.