Thinking about shapes for their own sakes has me pondering questions about what I like in art. I used to visit the museum and press my nose as close to a canvas as the guards would permit. I loved looking at the surfaces up close, then standing back and seeing how shapes, edges and colors transformed into things. The pure loveliness of colors enchanted me. Now I’m the one creating the color combinations and finding my enchantments at home.
It’s a little different when it’s your drawing — but only a little different. For instance, I love the purple marks in parallel formation at the end of the fish’s tail. I don’t know what I was looking at that translated into these lines, but absent the source material, I just enjoy the lines themselves. Seen this close, it isn’t even evident that the yellow tapering shape belongs to a fish. It’s just a tapering yellow of slightly different hues, some more orangish, some dull ochre-ish and some slightly green.
Anything verging in the direction of orange looks more intense against the pale blue. The brilliant cobalt blue contour line against the fish turns into deep jade in places. There’s a spot of brown-almost-becoming red which becomes a vortex for the curving fish tail energy. I have no idea what that was, but I like its presence here.
In all these details my drawings of things are not so different from my drawings of not-things. Colors are beautiful in themselves. I try to immerse myself mentally in color, just as the fishes are immersed in their water-world. Color in life is seamlessly everywhere. It genuinely is our mental environment out of which emotion and thought happen just as surely as the water is the fish’s living environment.
Fantabulous Koi 
Indeed colors are. (K)
These give me the joy I experience in the presence of a Rothko ❤