18/30 Paintings in January

Robert Henri continues from "A set palette ...

" ... may look quite impossible for its want of white in comparison with the subject before you. 

It certainly is, any paint is, if you expect to reproduce the thing in nature. 

But your work is not, and cannot be, a reproduction. 

Nature has its laws. Your pigments and your flat canvas have other laws. 

You must work within the laws of your material."

12:30 pm Juneau    6 x 8 inches      oil on Arches Huile paper

I couldn't help but find a poem for this painting today. 

Fog

A vagueness comes over everything,

as though proving color and contour

alike dispensable: the lighthouse

extinct, the islands' spruce-tips

drunk up like milk in the

universal emulsion; houses

reverting into the lost

and forgotten; granite

subsumed, a rumor

in a mumble of ocean.

Tactile

definition, however, has not been

totally banished: hanging

tassel by tassel, panicled

foxtail and needlegrass,

dropseed, furred hawkweed,

and last season's rose-hips

are vested in silenced

chimes of the finest,

clearest sea-crystal.

Opacity

opens up rooms, a showcase

for the hueless moonflower

corolla, as Georgia

O'Keefe might have seen it,

of foghorns; the nodding

campanula of bell buoys; 

the ticking, linear

filigree of bird voices. 

Amy Clampitt

30 in 30 Paintings in January