I found an article by Tom Robb in one of those magazines I've stored away meaning to read at some future point. I do this; the piece is several years old, and concerns the first appearance of Michael Willcox's first book on colour selection, Tom thought that Willcox skated over the instinctive choice of colour, so far as I could tell, and rebelled against the allegedly more scientific approach. Well, it's late; but once upon a time I replied to an article in the syndicated parish magazine in which the late (and so far as I'm concerned entirely unlamented) Mary Whitehouse was wittering on about something. I thought she was hugely illogical, and so replied, only to have the editor respond that the article had been written some 5 years previously, and however long the memory of his readers, he doubted that my riposte would have quite the resonance it might have had if I'd made it at around the same time. One saw his point. However, this particular argument is as current now as it was then, and I just wonder why Tom Robb (an interesting artist, and perennial contributor to The Artist) felt it legitimate or apposite to criticize the Willcox book while having no words of criticism for those "professional" artists - professional in the sense that they seek almost any means to supplement their income from sales of paintings - who flog their own ready-mixed paints, amongst other things..... What is the more legitimate target: someone who seeks to explain the science of colour mixing, or those who avoid that awkward subject altogether by flogging their "country olive", "midnight black",or "natural blue"? The Terry Harrisons, the Matthew Palmers, the Charles Evanses of this world? Is it entirely coincidental that these painters offer their products in watercolour, rather than in acrylic or oil? Or is the sole coincidence here that most leisure painters employ watercolour - so that's where the market for the quick and easy lies? Well no, of course it isn't. And they, and the paint manufacturers, know that. So rather than teach us something about the constituents of paint, and how colour-mixing might logically be understood, they exploit the desire for quick and relatively easy results. Knowing, as they do, that people think watercolour is easy - which it isn't - and that those who take to it as the first option will be grateful for any shortcut that gets them more quickly, and dully predictably, to where they want to go. There are legitimate criticisms to be made of the Michael Willcox approach, and I don't use only the range he recommends. And if people say it's prescriptive, I won't argue - if they have a reasonably comprehensible alternative. But I'm afraid I detect the scent of the market in much of this: ready-mixes sell; the paint manufacturers - particularly Daler Rowney - have gone along with it, and market these ready-mixed colours; and they advertise them in the magazines, which pay the salaries of any number of tutors, "professionals", and "experts". I do remember a piece in one of the magazines in which a writer spoke of the "lazy" element of ready-mixes; unfortunately, all the criticism was in the headline, and none in the text. It isn't only lazy, though it certainly is that, it's also productive of ignorance - you learn exactly nothing about colour if you use these mixes, and far from enabling further progress, I believe that these approaches inhibit it. Maybe that doesn't matter if all you want is instant results, but it sticks in my throat to read criticism of an attempt to understand the real basis of colour mixing entirely unbalanced by the least possible criticism of the cheap and easy approach which goes out of its way to avoid the least understanding of the subject. Leisure painter or "professional", we deserve better than that.