Painting can be an obsession. Did you ever notice that painters paint … all the time? Painting small Brooklyns is my latest painting obsession. This is a view on Franklin Avenue towards Atlantic Avenue. This is a busy intersection in terms of foot-traffic because there's a subway station across the street where you can get the train to Manhattan. I took it recently to see the Delacroix show at the Met.
Here's a quote from Delacroix's Journal for May 5, 1852 (Walter Pach translation):
"One should lay in one's picture so that it [h]as the look of representing the scene on a gray day, without sun, without clear-cut shadows. Speaking radically, there are neither lights nor shades. There is a color mass for each object, having different reflections on all sides. Let us suppose that, in this scene, in the open air and under gray light, a ray from the sun suddenly illumines the objects: you will have lights and shades as they are understood, but they are pure accidents. The deeper truth of this, singular as it may seem, contains the whole comprehension of color in painting. How strange it is that this truth has been understood by only a very small number of great painters, even among those who are regarded as colorists."
If I understand this correctly (which I may not), I am reminded of the oft-heard phrase: paint shapes of color, not things. The things, even "lights and shades," will take care of themselves. My French original identifies this passage as defining the "doctrine of impressionism."
6x8 oil on panel.
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