Color intensity & setting limits

When given a full range of color you inevitably want to use whatever is available and yet that's what creates unsettlement, confusion and lack of focus in a work. Masterworks show, even Monet's more abstract late landscapes, that the most powerful relationships are of key two or three colors. The rest are minor accents. However, it's the limitation and the choice of those most powerful relationships that poses the most difficult question in a painting. Somehow, just utilizing two or three colors isn't enough. The accents are just as important, even though there're less of them. So really it's this play of intensity that is key. It's the constant control over composition, quantity and power of pigment that is at play.