"The work of art must seize upon you...carry you away."
With a limited palette, the older painters could do just as well as today what they did was sounder.
An artist must eat sparingly and give up a normal way of life.
To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.
Everybody has their reasons.
One morning, one of us ran out of the black, it was the birth of Impressionism.