NPPF: CANTO ONE color

[cfalbert]

"I had a favorite young shagbark there
With ample dark jade leaves and a  black, spare, 
Vermiculated trunk. The setting sun
Bronzed the black bark,  around which,  like undone 
Garlands, the shadow of the foliage fell."

This seems very much like a  description of a  Barbizon school painting, specifically the dark, shadowy scenes of Corot and Courbet.

Later...

"My picture book was at an early age
The painted parchment papering our cage:
Mauve rings around the moon; blood orange sun;
Twinned Iris; and that rare  phenomenon
The iridule - when, beautiful and strange,
In a bright sky above a mountain range
One  opal cloudlet in an oval form
Reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm
Which in a distant valley has been staged -
For we are most artistically caged."

Now the pallette has switched to that of the Impressionists, "blood orange"/"opal" suggesting perhaps some of Monet's later works like haystacks and lillies....

There are  likely to be art historians who know better, but I always understood the Barbizons to be the last "school" confined entirely to the studio. It was the dirt on the windowpanes which filtered and generated the shadowy atmosphere suggested by these paintings. Paint in a  tube, developed in the mid 19th century (I've been told), allowed those who followed this particular genre to take their acts  "outside", hence the radical change in color schemes....

So, it can be said, that the impressionists too did "fly through the pane".......

love,
cfa
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20030728/b4826e32/attachment.html>