Top o’ the Morning to you - Happy St. Patrick’s Day 2017!

Green beer, green leprechauns, green hats, green clover — green everything on St. Patrick's Day.

Even when it is not St. Patrick’s Day, green is everywhere. Green is the color of nature. It symbolizes growth, harmony, freshness, and fertility. Green feels safe. Green takes up more space in the spectrum visible to the human eye. It’s the most common color in the natural world, and it’s second only to blue as the most common favorite color. It’s the color we associate with money, the environment, and aliens. It’s the color of life. No wonder that wearing a bit (or lots) of green wards off bad luck and pinches.

May you have the Luck of the Irish!

Fleeing from the Great Potato Famine, my father’s grandparents came to America in the 1800s. Over a million in Ireland died from starvation and disease when the potato blight destroyed their only food. A million others fled to America with hopes of finding a better life. There are stories of families finally reaching the Irish shores so hungry that, when they saw the green coastal grass and clover, they dropped to the ground and grazed, staining their lips and mouths bright green. This is one reason why green is an emblematic color of the Irish.

Some of those Irish who made it to the coast to board ships for America were not so lucky. There are many accounts of families giving everything they had to pay the shipmaster, only to be betrayed by the dishonorable crew and murdered just off shore. The stories are heart wrenching, yet told with a sense of triumph by descendants. The term “luck of the Irish” really isn’t about luck at all, but about determination, and perseverance; it’s more of an attitude — a positive look at a bad situation. 

It’s about how our setbacks propel us forward.

The Texas Panhandle has just had an unbelievable setback with the fires that burned over 800,000 acres, killed thousands of animals, destroyed homes and livelihoods, claimed eight lives, and broke the hearts of countless others. For as far as you can see, and in the Texas Panhandle you can see a long ways, the land is one huge charred black scar. In a week or so, by the mysterious forces of nature, the earth will awaken and through the ashen crust, the first color to sprout will be green — green shoots of rebirth and revitalization stretching towards the sun. Green brings with it a sense of hope. The people of the Texas Panhandle are resilient. They have that Irish spirit — the luck of the Irish. Like the grass, they too will rise above the blackness as the healing power of the color green brings hope and endurance.  

What happens to your body in the presence of green? Your pituitary gland is stimulated. Your muscles are more relaxed. In short, green is calming, stress-relieving, and, paradoxically – invigorating. Did you know that time seems to pass more quickly in a green room? Green helps you have good judgement. Green has great healing power. Green is the most restful color for the human eye; it can improve vision. It’s been shown to improve reading ability and creativity. Smells that we associate with the color green affect us as well. Eucalyptus is calming and soothing while lime is invigorating and refreshing. And what about that fresh smell of chlorophyll on an early spring day?

As a painter, I find green intriguingly beautiful — especially in the springtime when there seems to be an extra abundance of green in every variation imaginable. I also find it overwhelming because there are so many shades of green. Green is the color I struggle with most.  I’m always challenged when I try to paint it. Outdoors in nature, all that green intimidates me -- or it used to, until I began to understand it better. 

Visually, green recedes, making a small space seem larger. Green is considered to be cool in temperature most of the time, but depending upon which colors are used in combination with it, green can also have a warming effect. In the landscape it is beautiful, but trying to put all that green in a painting does not always work. You’ve got to learn to see the yellow-greens and the yellow-oranges. Using green’s compliments and discords keep a landscape painting from being ‘too green.’  You've got to learn to see the red in the green.

I remember seeing the cover of the Pastel Journal back in 2000 with the gorgeous green painting by the International Grand Prize Winner, Skip Whitcomb. It was mesmerizing. How could he handle all that green? That painting made me want to overcome my fear of green. While the painting below is not the one featured on that 2000 cover, it is an exceptional example of a painting with green. Beautifully executed, it is anything but monochromatic.

Skip Whitcomb, "Snake River", oil, 8x10 ©

Looking at the work of Scott Christensen, it is immediately clear that he has a sensuous relationship with the color green and is able to evoke its subtle innuendos. He sees and understands what creates the grays he sees in the green.

© Scott Christensen

Matt Smith also knows how to perform magic with the color green. By working the warms and cools, he infuses light and shadow and moves us through the foreground to the background.

© Matt Smith

Sarah Gottesman of the Art Genome Project reports that green pigments have been some of the most poisonous in history:  While the color green evokes nature and renewal, its pigments have been some of the most poisonous in history. In 1775, the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele invented a deadly hue, Scheele’s Green, a bright green pigment laced with the toxic chemical arsenic. Cheap to produce, Scheele’s Green became a sensation in the Victorian era, even though many suspected the color to be dangerous for artists and patrons alike. The French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s bedroom wallpaper even featured Scheele’s Green, and historians believe the pigment caused the revolutionary’s death in 1821. By the end of the 19th century, Paris Green—a similar mixture of copper and arsenic—replaced Scheele’s Green as a more durable alternative, enabling Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir to create vivid, emerald landscapes. Used as a rodenticide and an insecticide, Paris Green was still highly toxic, and may have been responsible for Cézanne’s diabetes and Monet’s blindness. Not surprisingly, it was eventually banned in the 1960s.

Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, ca. 1885-87, The Courtauld Gallery, London

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Picking Flowers , 1875, Seattle Art Museum

When the French brought home absinthe after the Algerian wars in the 1840s, it became all the rage. By the 1860s, Parisian cafes had established 5:00 p.m. as “l’heure verte” –- “the green hour.”  No one depicted the green hour better than Henri Toulouse Lautrec in his 1895 painting At the Moulin Rouge. The green color suggests absinthe and its hallucinogenic qualities.

Green is everywhere. Hopefully you will now see it more perceptively. May it be a lucky charm in your painting.

“I don’t usually wear diamonds in the afternoon, but this is a special occasion.”

—Liberace, at the 1979 opening of his amazing Liberace Museum in Las Vegas

This is a special occasion for me as I launch my art blog, Ablaze with Color.  I find much inspiration in this colorful world. Color sets me on fire. Color ignites my passion. Color burns fiercely in me.  My artful quest is, and probably always will be, harnessing the power of color.

The effect of color on us and in our art is profound. Color immediately attracts attention. Colors influence and interact with each other. Color has many relationships. Color can shift visual balance, create a focal point, influence our emotions, and expand communication.

The rods and cones in our eyes allow us to see and discern color. We have 100 to 120 million rods and somewhere between 6 and 7 million cones in our retinas — each of us unalike. The rods are more sensitive than the cones. However, they are not sensitive to color, but to light. The rods are responsible for night vision, our most sensitive motion detection, and our peripheral vision. Color vision and the highest visual acuity are attributed to the cones. While we all will recognize a specific color, we may still, in actuality, see it somewhat differently.

In his book Air Guitar, art critic Dave Hickey writes about living above the Golden Nugget Casino in Las Vegas. His apartment faced west, and at the end of every day, he would see the gorgeous sunsets from his balcony overlooking the neon signs of the Las Vegas Strip.  One evening, his brain did a flip and it occurred to him that the sunset seemed fake and garish while the glow of the neon lights seemed natural and beautiful. To him, the nightly neon lights of the Strip consistently glittering recklessly appeared real while the sunset,  performing a stunning light show different from any other, seemed unreal and just flat outright phony. 

Saving the Bright Lights of Las Vegas

Another Las Vegas legend, showman Liberace, may have been the all-time epitome of fake. He covered practically everything he owned - costumes, cars, pianos - with rhinestones. His ‘bad taste’ was real. He would stride onto stage in all of his outrageousness and give an unbelievable performance on the piano. Strangely, he appealed to all ages. It was one of our programs — we kids, our parents, and our grandparents would be mesmerized weekly by him on TV.  Underneath all that glitter was supreme talent. The art of his showmanship was most definitely bona-fide. Liberace was, as critics called him, a “genuine rhinestone.”

It is an interesting idea, and a rich one at that, to think of what is authentic and what is bogus in our art. What may be genuine for one artist might be counterfeit to another.  We all look at the world and art with different eyes.

As an artist, is your work genuine to you? Was your work more authentic when you were starting out, struggling to learn the rules and the tricks of the trade? As you learned, did your knowledge make your art less authentic and more formula driven? Do we go through a phase of inauthenticity before we find ourselves (our style) and become genuine? If we are inspired by other artists, literature, music, nature, etc., does that make our art fraudulent? If we paint what we see, does that make our art a forgery? 

It is in painting what we see that we learn to see. We learn to see through close observation of our subject. Observing closely gives us a deeper understanding and a responsiveness to what we see. It increases our awareness. Close observation gives us an exclusive kind of sensual reality that ignites memories, emotions, and that intense vibrant connection that comes from knowing something intimately.

As we learn to see, we learn to bring our own experiences into what we paint. Our experiences shade and color what we see, and therefore, what we paint. In our paintings, whether consciously or not, we place our individuality, our awareness or unawareness, our stories — our choices reflecting who we are with our own distinct expression.

I love to paint skies with bold intense colors as I see them. Sometimes when I look at my painted skies, I wonder if nature might mimic the sincerity of my paintings. Nevertheless, I know I create my own truth from the beauty I see in nature. Even though it is not exactly as nature presents it to me, I use color to capture the richness of reality. Space and movement are based on the way I have learned to use color rather than photographic representation. As I have become more masterful in my understanding of how the eye reads and responds to color, my paintings have taken on a unique vibrancy and sense of animation. They are my honest interpretation of how I see the world aglow with light, color, and emotion. 

For real.