Thursday, February 10, 2011

The Blue in the Mountain

Dear Friend,

The title for this blog and of this recent painting is The Blue in the Mountain. 

Click on picture for larger view.






In order to write this I need to go back and date myself, back maybe three decades ago, at a time when I first started selling my artwork.

I met a older Calif. artist who was getting ready to retire.  Some of his family visited him and complained that he used to paint such pretty things, (flowers, barns ect.).  He gave me this painting at the start of my painting career.  Its been in every studio I have had throughout the years. He also gave me a small sort of abstract male clay statue he made. It had no legs and was on a wire stand, the artist told me the legs broke off in the kiln.  This moved me, because he (George Doleys 1909-1978), had polio as a kid and wore a leg brace.






When he gave me Blue Mountain, I did not understand it.  It wasn't until maybe five years later that while reading this book The Notebooks of Leonardo daVinci  by Pamela Taylor that I discovered the following
excerpt by Leonardo himself.

"You know that in an atmosphere of equal density the remotest objects only seen through it between you eye and them---appear blue and almost of the same hue as the atmosphere itself when the sun is in the east."

"Those you wish should look farthest away you must make proportionately bluer."

The author of this book Pamela Taylor states that Leonardo  lonely gentle man, who bought market birds just to set them free and became a vegetarian because of his dislike of killing animals.  Pamala Taylor finished this co-work of her husband after his sudden death in 1957, he was the Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

There is many of wonderful tips about art in this book, I plan on re-reading it soon -joyce



So now know how this title came about.   

Details, 16x20 standard frame size,  acrylic, honeysuckle and turquoise colors, gallery wrapped canvas sides painted like painting.  
The price is my standard rate this year, 1.00 per square inch (length x width)