I think every month and season have a distinctive color. Some of course you could all reasonably agree on such as ochres and warm colors for autumn. However I have always associated the color red with January. This year three stalks of Amaryllis plant blooming in my dining room have agreed with my color beliefs.
Pastel 18"x12"
I think I will be doing several paintings of these brilliant ruffles as they wax and wane through the growing process. Hoorah for red!!
Thank you David Hockney!! My artistic hero. I have long followed and admired David Hockney for his artistic energy, investigation, devotion to drawing, innovation, exploration and use of technology. One of my all time favorite books is Secret Knowledge (Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters). In this book he reveals a careful discovery that only a practicing draftsman, painter could discover. Based on his personal knowledge , voluminous experience, Hockney shows that the so called great draftsman of the art world used mechanical devices to aid their eye and hands in their drawings and paintings. He shows that Vermeer, Van Eyck, Messina, Caravaggio up to Andy Warhol used optics to create their work. That is they used 'monocular" vision as opposed to "binocular" vision.
The Eye of Horus
He shows how Cezanne's use of his own two eyes, i.e. binocular vision is what pulls you into his picture. Hockney says "Cezanne's innovation was that he put into his pictures his own doubts about how objects relate to himself, recognizing that view points are in flux, that we always see things from multiple, sometimes contradictory, positions. It is a human, binocular vision ( two eyes, two viewpoints, and therefore doubt), in contrast to the tyrannical, monocular vision of the lens (Velazquez), which ultimately reduces the viewer to a mathematical point, fixing him to a particular spot in space and time."
Apples by Paul Cezanne
David Hockney's work developing eye hand coordination and emotional response to the world in which he lives is being celebrated in a gigantic lovely exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. Hockney believes as I do too much attention has been given to the exploration of mind games and not enough to the exploration of drawing and our binocular vision as artists. Take a peek at this wonderful video. I hope to post more.
Read the blog Making a Mark for more information about the Royal Academy exhibition of David Hockneys current discoveries and work http://makingamark.blogspot.com/
