JMB,
Painting well
presumes you have an innate understanding of color complements (read: opposites on a colorwheel), an ability to co-mingle patterns of different scales, a knack for mixing textures, and an inexplicable talent for introducing an element of surprise in your ensemble that baffles and delights onlookers.
Spend an hour or two in the galleries with Vermeers and the Impressionists and you'll soon realize that, while you can analyze the paintings using the criteria above, making them is something else entirely and cannot be explained by the mere knowledge of these principles. The art critic and the artist remain, most often, two fundamentally different species.
If anything, I'd advise anyone to try to be an artist in their dress, rather than an erudite art critic trying to paint according to rules...
I recently came across a phrase that sums up all this very nicely: "
master all your talents into instincts". No colourwheel or texture mixing rule can explain the way a painter uses colour. Back to Proust 101 (what can I do, I keep going back to him, he's so dense - and it was YOU who mentioned JUST Vermeer and the Impressionists
): "s
tyle for a writer, as well as colour for a painter, is not a question of technique, but of vision."
So... DO dress melodiously!
Listen to the music in this poem, even without paying attention to the words - it's pure melody!:
L'invitation au voyage
(Charles Baudelaire)
Mon enfant, ma soeur,
Songe à la douceur
D'aller là-bas vivre ensemble!
Aimer à loisir,
Aimer et mourir
Au pays qui te ressemble!
Les soleils mouillés
De ces ciels brouillés
Pour mon esprit ont les charmes
Si mystérieux
De tes traîtres yeux,
Brillant à travers leurs larmes.
Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.
Des meubles luisants,
Polis par les ans,
Décoreraient notre chambre;
Les plus rares fleurs
Mêlant leurs odeurs
Aux vagues senteurs de l'ambre,
Les riches plafonds,
Les miroirs profonds,
La splendeur orientale,
Tout y parlerait
À l'âme en secret
Sa douce langue natale.
............................
(translations here:
http://fleursdumal.org/poem/148)
Gruto,
If Baudelaire was not the greatest contester of established patterns in art, then who was... And yet here is his ideal, in two lines:
Nothing but order and beauty there,
Luxe, peace and voluptousness.
Order and beauty... peace... voluptuousness cannot be without them and luxe is supreme harmony. Because
Everything shall speak
To the soul its secret
Sweet native tongue.
Music, painting, literature -
Style that speaks the native language of the soul, not an Esperanto that is a cold invention of the mind.
And it CAN be expressed in a fresh way, with lively contrast and surprising lines, but by affirming rather than by denying - by creating an original landscape instead maiming an old master's, as in the pictural palimpsest above (to the eternal contemplation of which we have doomed poor Schoenberg on this webpage, like a damned soul in Dante's Inferno):
("Luxe, Calme et Volupte", Henri Matisse)
... and the Forum page! 
