The Concept of the Color Macchia

For many reasons the artist would like to simply begin with color and not be concerned with the distribution of lights and darks and the principles of composition. One would like to just get on with it, just to paint.

A color macchia is a painting made with large spots of four or five colors only. This is the whole idea of the limited palette, but maybe taken to an extreme. The idea is that color is the most important factor in the work. Perhaps the artist was primarily taken by the colors of a scene, of costumes, of flowers, etc. In this case the artist will dispense with drawing (line macchia) or preliminary study of the dark and light masses (mass macchia) and will work directly with color pigments (the color macchia).