On the edge and on edge

Since my last post (which is an important one for "my teacher" to see), I've been experiencing serious unrest and upheaval about my involvement with color and with painting.

 The pairing of the two images below is indicative of the shift which seems to be pushing me out of watercolor and into some other medium. I can hardly believe I just wrote that sentence. I think I'm realizing that the color that I love is the color I see on the watercolor palette, not on the paper.

 The making of the 400 squares of saturated color offered a drumbeat of working with pure colors. The photograph of the squares in the sunlight threw some kind of a switch in my brain.

Here are the images which hold the key to my future work with colors. 

Left: two-color etching. Right: watercolor - backyard reduced to shapes

The image on the left was made decades ago when I was wholly enraptured by intaglio. I was at the time trapped in a school which only offered a future in lithography, a medium that had absolutely no appeal for me. (It was at this point that I went on to graduate school in literature.) So, here am I, almost 40 years on from that red, looking for my medium, a medium that will give me the color that I want.

Your very best red . . .

Two things combined this morning: a reported conversation between Gauguin and Sérusier, and the painting posted by Susan Abbott on March 7.

The conversation ran like this:

Gauguin: How to you see the colour of that tree?
Sérusier: Yellow.
Gauguin: Well, use your very best yellow. How do you see the colour of the earth?
Sérusier: Red.
Gauguin: Then use your very best red.

This bit was on p. 193 of Ball's Bright Earth, still my nightly read.

There's a lot to chew on in these few lines: about color, and about how to make art.

Wild Image Search and Hurricane Gustav

It's 5 a.m. in New Orleans now and my server, where this blog is located, is in Metairie, LA. So, don't be surprised if you weren't able to get here in the first two days of September! (Actually I just ran in here to post this after listening to CNN's Sanjay Gupta report live from Metairie.)

Bob Croxford in the PhotoShelter forum posted this link a couple of days ago and I must have wasted and hour and half with it. So, of course, I want all other togs to do the same!

http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolour/

It's a wonderful piece of efficient coding--something not widely seen now in these days of cheap memory. It does color searches on images. I have a question though about the image pool they are using (It's from Alamy.). I wonder how they selected their 3 mil of images from the over 10 mil on Alamy. I wonder too, do they ever refresh it?

Anyway, if you are an Alamy contributor it's worth a look, and if you are an AD or graphic designer, you might find it quite helpful in some circumstances. And, for fun, trying selecting MORE than 10 colors.