[Anne Hall]

Peter, I have watched Nelson paint just two demos. He is not one of the many accomplished artists who can paint and talk at the same time, so what I say is based on my observation and explanation that his teaching assistants made later.

Nelson uses all the colors on his palette. I watched him touch every red available in the course of mixing the wide variety of tones he painted into the flesh of his paintings. He doesn't work by set formulas, but by looking, mixing, and adjusting: making color statements and playing with the relationships.

When I painted in his class, we were urged to "swim color in," making our paintings reflect what we saw: orange into a blue drape, green into a shadow. It's radically different from painting with a limited palette. The basic idea is to start brighter than you'd ever dream, because you can never make a painting brighter than tube colors.

I hope you will have an opportunity to see Nelson painting. I have seen a couple masters with limited palettes paint; David Leffel, Albert Handell, Sherrie McGraw. Theirs is a very different process than Nelson's. Watching him paint will undoubtedly be more revealing than my description!