The Power of Suggestion

This 5x7 pastel  shows a small overpass on River Drive right next to the Delaware River in Washington Crossing Park.

Ruskin in Modern Painters says, "...every touch is false which does not suggest more than it represents..."  A few paragraphs later he expands on this in his delicious style, when complaining that Claude Lorrain painted a wall "in one dead void of uniform gray."  Ruskin writes: "Nature would have let you see, nay, would have compelled you to see, thousands of spots and lines, not one to be absolutely understood or accounted for, but yet all characteristic and different from each other; breaking lights on shattered stones, vague shadows from waving vegetation, irregular stains of time and weather, mouldering hollows, sparkling casements--all would have been there--none, indeed, seen as such, none comprehensible or like themselves, but all visible; little shadows, and sparkles, and scratches, making the whole space of color a transparent, palpitating, various infinity."