One of the first lessons that you learn if you want to be a painter is that it takes only

a few basic colors to mix just about any conceivable color. And once that fundamental skill has been acquired, mixing colors, which is well nigh impossible for the uninitiated, becomes practically automatic, almost as easy as tiding a bike. As for what colors can do, singly or in combination, this only becomes more mysterious the longer an artist works.

Much of the mystery is buried deep in the nitty-gritty of technique. The impact of color, the very nature of color, is experienced in relation to other colors and also in relation to a medium. A certain red pigment, for example, will make an utterly different impression if it is presented in a water-based or oil-based medium, in a scumbled or impastoed fashion, as a mark left by a stick of pastel, as ink printed from an etching plate or a woodblock. And all of this still leaves aside the emotional or poetic or psychological ramifications of colors -- the question of what this red or that blue suggests or does not suggest, and to whom, and under what conditions. Color, which most of us begin life by regarding as one of the verities, red-yellow-blue being as fundamental as the ABCs, can eventually seem to be an experience of the most radical subjectivity. Artists aim to give that coloristic subjectivity a power that is both immediate and enduring.

A walk through New York's galleries will tell you that there are a vast number of ways in which color can be presented to the public. A look through the impressive literature on the development of color in art, which has been growing rapidly in the past decade, will tell you that history prepares us for this situation. Painters who want to pull emotional nuances out of subtly mixed colors will be said by some to be nostalgic for the tonal modulations of another age. Although we may be inclined to think of "modem" color as abstract color -- as color that is detached from representation -- it can be argued that abstract color is at least as old as naturalistic color, embracing both the heraldic imagery of the Middle Ages and the polychrome architecture of ancient times.

Nowadays color, which reaches us in so many kinds of keyed-up, eye-popping technologically generated forms, can seem more a matter of "culture" than of "nature." The zingy, cheerfully artificial color that Jeremy Blake uses to considerable effect in the kinetic flood of images that fill his DVD projections is selfevidently computer-based. There are also many painters who, while working with brush and canvas, like to mirror the riot of contemporary color. Trevor Winkfield, who showed new paintings this winter, will strike some gallerygoers as an artist who never met a color he didn't like.

We learn in the first paragraph that ______.

A．the few basic colors are more important than any mixed color

B．mixing colors can be very difficult

C．colors have very strong expressive powers

D．a single color is more mysterious than colors in combination