Color, if you stop to think, is really the decorative touch which God gives
to the universe. It would have been just as easy to make everything gray—every
rose but the shadow of itself—every tree and rock and cloud a monotone of
gradation. Instead of that, everything we look at, from a violet to an
overbending sky, is enriched and glorified by millions of color tones as
infinite in their gradation as the waves of sound and light. Even in the grayest
days, when the clouds are bursting into tears and the whole landscape is
desolate as the barrenest and bleakest of mountain sides, these infinite
gradations of color permeate and redeem its barrenness, and to the true painter
fill it with joy and beauty. paintings for sale
There are many of us, however, who are not true painters and to whom the most
exquisite of color schemes are but dull results. Many of us walk around our
galleries passing the best pictures in silence; others ridicule what they cannot
understand. Even our own beloved Mark Twain, whose heart was always open to the
best and warmest of human impressions, and who expressed them in every line of
his pen, when led up to one of Turner's masterpieces, "The Slave Ship," a glory
of red, yellow, and blue running riot over a sunset sky, the whole reflected in
a troubled sea, remarked to his companion: "Very wonderful! Seen it before.
Always reminds me of a tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a plate of tomato
soup." oil painting reproductions for sale
The education of such barbarians belongs to our generation and should be
taken up by those of us who know or think we do. For true color is as great an
educator as true music.This knowledge of color harmony, this matching and
contrasting of different colors, but very few men and women possess. When they
do, it is generally inherited and thus a natural gift. The rest of the world
wear blue and purple, or orange and green, entirely ignorant of the harmonies of
nature even as bearing on their domestic surroundings. For myself, I have always
held that the most perfect harmonies required in either wall decoration,
furniture, dress goods, or any other fabrics that color enters into, have their
exact counterpart in some color tones of nature—that the russet-browns and
yellows of autumn; the contrasting opalescent hues of a morning sky,reproduction oil paintings uk, rose-pink,
pale blue, or delicate tea-rose yellow; the gloom of a forest with its
yellow-grays and blue-grays, the gray-green moss of the lichens, the brown of
the tree-trunks, the black and gray hues of the rocks, all these, if carefully
studied and analyzed and reproduced, would make beautiful anything in the world from a bonnet to a
château. To illustrate:
Several years ago an intimate friend of mine, a distinguished architect of
New York, the late Mr. Bruce Price, in designing a number of cottages at Tuxedo
sought in vain for some color mixture current in the paint-shops with which to
cover the outside of his buildings. All schemes of browns, olive-greens,
colonial yellow with white trimmings and the reverse, Pompeiian reds,
slate-grays, and dull yellows resulted in making "spots" of the houses, so that
the effect he wished to produce, that of the houses being merged into the
forest, was lost. Mr. Price was not only an architect, but he was an artist as
well. He had little skill with his brush, but he had that innate good taste,oil paintings on canvas for sale, with a keen eye to discern the subtle gradations in color, that only needed
change of occupation to make him a painter. One day, looking at a new bare
wooden cottage—unpainted as yet—in contrast to a mass of foliage in the
early autumn before the leaves had begun to turn, in which the yellow-grays one
often sees predominated, he suddenly thought to himself: "The tree-trunks and
underbrush do not stand out; they are all of one piece, each keeping its place,
while my house"—as he rather inelegantly but forcibly expressed it—"sticks up
like a sore thumb." Later, this very clever man made an analysis of the local
color in these several grays, and his subsequent matching and combining of these
different tints resulted in the exact tones of the forest before him, and when
this was completed and the house painted you felt should you enter the front
door that the leaves must be over your head. original oil paintings wholesale
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