"Ordinance" A defining moment in my painting came to me while I worked on this piece. I have been studying the painter Mark Rothko and the thin washes he used in his paints that acted like a stain. He layered his paint with these thinned colors and you could see the colors below. It dawned on me that, all along, I was struggling to pull out colors with the colors themselves. It hit me that complimentary or contrasting washes could accomplish the effect I was desperately looking for. This painting may not be a good example of this technique, but it's the one that revealed it to me. Painted on 9"x12" watercolor paper.