I'm Gretchen Ruben and this is a little happier.

I am obsessed with the beautiful subject of color, and in fact, I'm working on a little book called My Color Pogramage.

One thing that puzzled me was that despite my love and fascination with color,

I wasn't very attracted by the work of artists who restrict their use of color or who work almost purely in color.

Perhaps paradoxically, for a long time, for me, these kinds of paintings cause color to fade out of importance.

I was inclined to agree with Matisse who wrote,

an avalanche of color has no force.

But my view of this use of color shifted when I read this passage from artist and truest daybook

from March 27, 1975. Her description made me see how my vision was too cramped, too literal.

I needed to widen my eyes to see color itself.

I also love this passage because it's a great example of what I describe in my book better than

before with the strategy of the lightning bolt. Sometimes we learn something,

here's something, understands something, sees something, and in a flash with a bolt of lightning,

everything changes. A difficult change becomes easy, a whole life can be redirected.

It's rare, but it does happen. And here, Antruitt gives an extraordinary account.

And by way of background, Antruitt was a major American artist of the 20th century,

who did many kinds of work, but is best known for her large vertical wooden sculptures

and for her use of color. And as a side note, I will remark that it can be a bit annoying,

as how often visual artists turn out to be excellent writers as well, which seems like, you know,

double-helping. So this very slightly edited passage describes a change that happened in Antruitt's

life when she was 40 years old. She writes,

The change itself was set off by a weekend trip to New York with my friend Mary Pinshamire

...