{"id":1315,"date":"2023-01-14T06:09:16","date_gmt":"2023-01-14T14:09:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/?p=1315"},"modified":"2023-01-15T07:51:16","modified_gmt":"2023-01-15T15:51:16","slug":"when-shades-of-grey-outnumber-the-green","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/2023\/01\/when-shades-of-grey-outnumber-the-green\/","title":{"rendered":"When shades of grey outnumber the green"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019m an artist on vacation, but I\u2019m not always sketching and painting. England certainly provides a country full of color, including just about every variation on leaf and grass. Consider a few of the descriptors for the color green: apple, ash, Australian, beryl, black, blue, Bohemian, bronze, Chinese, chlorophyll, chrome, cinnabar, cold, earth, emerald, fir, forest, French, grass, Ionian, Kelly, lagoon, leaf, lizard, May, mossy, neon, office, olive, oxide, Paris, pea, phthalo, pine, Reseda, Rowney, sage, sap, shamrock, spring, spruce, sunlit, tea, terre verte, tropical, turquoise, umber, verdigris, Verona, and viridian. Whew! And they\u2019re all <\/em>here in the UK! You\u2019d think this visitor, a desert<\/em> visitor no less, would enthusiastically seek capturing them all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do<\/em> carry a fat little sketchbook for when the mood strikes, and, on yesterday\u2019s mostly sunny day, I could have been drawing en plein air.<\/em> I\u2019ve never been particularly enthusiastic about painting outdoors, and when I have done so, I\u2019ve been irritable about the flies, sand, wind, and rain. Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh certainly recorded their complaints. One of Van Gogh\u2019s works, The Olives <\/em>(below)* even has a grasshopper\u2019s head and hind legs entombed in the oil paint. Van Gogh expert Martin Bailey comments, \u201cHe either didn\u2019t notice\u2014or perhaps didn\u2019t care\u2014and carried on . . . .\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

* The insect parts are in the lower right sector of the painting. You can view The Olives<\/em> in the collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oxford\u2019s rain and drizzle are too daunting today, so art will have to come in book form. Blackwell Books Art and Poster section was a carnival of large-format volumes on art movements, artists, and criticism. I leafed through some hefty books on Islamic art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Perusing the offerings at Blackwell Books<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Back in my Utah studio, I\u2019m currently working on several large acrylic paintings based on the Arab world, several canvases at a time, among them \u201cThe Oudmaker\u2019s Breakfast\u201d and \u201cWhy Have You Brought Me Here?\u201d, my third work in a Rudolph Valentino series. I am fascinated by Islamic border patterns, draped stripey fabrics, and Arab camels, goats, coffee pots, and musical instruments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also perused the poetry section in Blackwell. Next to a display of World War I poets, I found a book of American writer Sylvia Plath\u2019s pen-and-ink sketches, including the sample at right. She\u2019d done studies of shoes, wine bottles, boats, houses, and streets. Her sure hand and flowy draftsmanship were a revelation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
A sketch by Sylvia Plath<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

She\u2019d been living in London for four years when, at her flat on a cold February morning in 1963, that same sure hand stuffed clothing around her children\u2019s bedroom doors, opened the oven door, and turned on the gas. She\u2019s buried in the New Cemetery of the small village of Heptonstall, West Yorkshire, where her husband Ted Hughes\u2019 parents lived. Unforgiving tourists often ink over or chisel off the Hughes surname from her tombstone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A little out of character for me, I\u2019ve made no bookstore purchases today, so I pull out a small, damp umbrella from my backpack and push open Blackwell\u2019s front door into the drizzle to the sidewalk, rejoining my travel companions loneliness and otherness. I pull my umbrella into commission, then dodge a gaggle of English school girls in navy blue uniforms as they skip into the book shop. I head for a nearby tearoom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m an artist on vacation, but I\u2019m not always sketching and painting. England certainly provides a country full of color, including just about every variation on leaf and grass. Consider a few of the descriptors for the color green: apple, ash, Australian, beryl, black, blue, Bohemian, bronze, Chinese, chlorophyll, chrome, cinnabar, cold, earth, emerald, fir, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel-writing","category-united-kingdom-and-ireland-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1315"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1319,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315\/revisions\/1319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}