“What I need most of all is color, always, always” said Claude Monet. I can’t define my love for colours any better than this. Colours are a very important part of my life. It has always been, whether I was an artist or not.

When I was about nine or ten years old, my father stuck a picture of a scenic landscape on the wall above our main door. The picture had a lovely wooden cottage in the woods, with greenish blue hills in the background.
The photograph must have been clicked either in dawn or dusk, as the hills are in shadow while the wooden house and the trees around were lit up in warm sunlight. The weather was autumn and the trees were bright green, yellow and red in some places. It was a lovely colourful picture. I used to often look at the picture and imagine how beautiful it must be feeling to stay there. I could spend hours staring at it.
The love for this picture was so much that at bedtime, I would close my eyes and start imagining that two little angels come and take with me along with them. We fly up in the sky and go to the scene in the picture. I would then go inside the house which had bright white walls with book shelves all over and the house had no other furniture. The shelves to my amusement had all types of colours, crayons, pastels, colour pencils, and watercolours. They also had papers of many sizes and shapes.
I imagined that the angels say that I can take anything. I go grab the colours and paper and start painting sitting on the clean white floor. I would paint and paint and the floor is filled with many lovely paintings of mine. This imagination would make me so happy that even when I am writing this, I can feel that childlike happiness. The imagination was so vivid that I would dream it many times. Until date, this is my favourite dream.
My love for colours is not just restricted to paints and paper, I am always attracted to bright colours, especially the colours in nature. Flowers, birds, butterflies, bugs anything colourful, just captures my attention. Obviously they become my painting subjects.

This colourful bird also became my subject for its lovely bright coloured feathers. I saw the picture of this bird on Instagram page of Jainy Maria, a very talented bird enthusiast and photographer. This is a green sun bird clicked in Manipur, India.

The mauve berries stringed together is also taken from another photograph by Jainy. I am so thankful to her for the lovely photos. There are many more photos of birds on her page that I am excited to paint. I composed this page with these contrasting colours and I love it.
Coming back to my love of colours, again I will close with a quote by Monet. “Colour is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment”. This is like a happy obsession and torment. It is just like falling in love for the first time. And I am lucky to be forever in love with colours. I dream of rainbows everyday. When I don’t get to see a rainbow, I weave one with colours in the sky of my imagination.
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