From the interview with Bill Armstrong by Kala Herh for Musée Magazine:
ARMSTRONG: You know, I teach color theory so I have some technical background in color meaning and psychology, but color responses are subjective and depend on many different things. For myself, I find that often I work within a certain palette for a shoot, and if I leave the work out, when I come back the next day, those colors may not interest me at all. So there is a gestural aspect to how I work, trying to let the feelings of the moment express themselves in some way. It reminds me of a famous story about how a collector came to Rothko’s studio one day and asked to see some of his happy, yellow and red paintings, and he said something like, “Happy? Those are the colors of the Inferno.”