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The Artist’s
Almanac
June 2007
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Nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept
finely shorn
- Francis Bacon
Everyone wants a green lawn, no matter how small.
This may be a vestige of the days when plantation owners looked
out over their green fields and their fat cattle cropping them.
Now we judge our neighbors’ prosperity by the extent and greenness
of their lawns, and, sweating, crop our own.
Summer’s growth blocks sight and sound. Those foolhardy enough to
leave their lawn and penetrate June’s jungle risk ticks, poison
ivy and the maddening itch of chiggers. Distance is visible now
only across the lake, mown fields or in magnificent towers of
clouds.
This is the season of exuberant green. Trees, like lusty youths,
flaunt themselves, tossing their tresses before gathering storms.
Today Maples, Oaks, and even Hackberries pride themselves in their
billowing gowns of green. Here a trio of Elms continues their
graceful dance, despite the development surrounding them.
Green is a mystery. To the beginning artist, green is just that.
Nothing is more boring than his summer landscape painted with tube
greens. Camille Corot was a master at painting green woods, yet he
seasoned each one of them with a little touch of red. Cover the
red shawl to see how much it flavors the entire painting.
Camille Corot - The Edge of
The Woods - 1825
There are many greens. Every tree displays bright green in light,
dark green in shadow, and the most luminous green where backlit.
Trees greet the spring with red- tipped green, anticipating
autumn’s russet gown. Trees in distance pale to greenish gray and,
far away, to blue. Magnolias sport a shiny green, while cedar
looks near black.
Leaves reverse in winds before a storm, surreal against the black
and looming clouds.
George Inness – 1825-1894 –
The Rainbow
There are greens and there are greens. A mown lawn may be yellow
green, or stubbled taupe if dry. Winter moss on stones and logs
presents the greenest green, contrast to all about. Reflected
greens in swirling streams are most mysterious of all, and what is
more awesome than the turquoise greens of the waters of the Gulf
beyond white coastal sands? There are greens as subtle as a
whisper, as in a blue sky near the horizon or as an undertone of
flesh in a portrait.
Meindert Hobbema, The
Watermill with the Great Red Roof, c.1670
Dutch landscapists mixed black in their green shadows to brighten,
by contrast, their skies and their sunlit meadows. John Constable,
painted his trees over rustic red undertones, then sprinkled them
with flecks of white to make his forests sparkle with light.
Constable was eclipsed by Turner in his native England, yet he
became wildly popular across the Channel in France, where a new
school of Artists known as Impressionists were adopting his
methods of painting sparkling light. Claude Monet, in this picture
of his Waterlily Garden at Giverny, paints a tunnel of green using
every color and spots of light.
The German philosopher Goethe wrote an exhaustive treatise on the
theory of color, only to have it later disproven and ridiculed.
Science simplifies color as a physical spectrum; Art teaches it as
an ever-changing theory. The artist may spend a lifetime of
experiment in the search for green, yet never solve the mystery.
Nothing cloys faster than a painting executed in one or two tube
greens. The amateur learns this soon and, if he is to grow,
launches on his own voyage of discovery. Just as there is no one
green, there is no one solution to his mystery. He is left to
himself to try, as others have, various answers. If he blest or
lucky, he may find his own.
Color, like Love, is more experience than theory.
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