Paint Palette Quotes

I wish I had the talent to paint the way I feel about you, for my words always feel inadequate. I imagine using red for your passion and pale blue for your kindness; forest green to reflect the depth of your empathy and bright yellow for your unflagging optimism. And still I wonder: can even an artist’s palette capture the full range of what you mean to me?

What are you doing here?” All right, he was standing in front of an easel, holding a paint palette and brush. “Taxidermy?” he responded with just a touch of his own sarcasm.

Ideally, travel broadens our perspectives personally, culturally, and politically. Suddenly, the palette with which we paint the story of our lives has more colors.

There will come a day, when this horror is not the only color on your palette.

The intellectual attainments of a man who thinks for himself resemble a fine painting, where the light and shade are correct, the tone sustained, the colour perfectly harmonised; it is true to life. On the other hand, the intellectual attainments of the mere man of learning are like a large palette, full of all sorts of colours, which at most are systematically arranged, but devoid of harmony, connection and meaning.

Why do you only paint what other people have already painted? Declan Lynch had asked. Because her brush had already come pre-loaded with someone else's palette.

There is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inwards as deeply. It is the love of a man or a woman for their world. For the world of their center where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame. The love of the diver for his world of wavering light. His world of pearls and tendrils and his breath at his breast. Born as a plunger into the deeps he is at one with every swarm of lime-green fish, with every colored sponge. As he holds himself to the ocean's faery floor, one hand clasped to a bedded whale's rib, he is complete and infinite. Pulse, power and universe sway in his body. He is in love. The love of the painter standing alone and staring, staring at the great colored surface he is making. Standing with him in the room the rearing canvas stares back with tentative shapes halted in their growth, moving in a new rhythm from floor to ceiling. The twisted tubes, the fresh paint squeezed and smeared across the dry on his palette. The dust beneath the easel. The paint has edged along the brushes' handles. The white light in a northern sky is silent. The window gapes as he inhales his world. His world: a rented room, and turpentine. He moves towards his half-born. He is in Love. The rich soil crumbles through the yeoman's fingers. As the pearl diver murmurs, 'I am home' as he moves dimly in strange water-lights, and as the painter mutters, 'I am me' on his lone raft of floorboards, so the slow landsman on his acre'd marl - says with dark Fuchsia on her twisting staircase, 'I am home.

We cannot all be artists and I must admit I do not know how to paint. But if I were to take a palette, all my colors would be of you.

painted in weather-colors now. With brushes dipped in nature’s palette. Mossgreen. Earth-brown. Crumbleblack

Your words on the screen are my color palette I dip my brush into your words and paint you On the sky, on the ceiling, on the snow; on the tablet Of things eternal : love truth beauty happiness

I've always fixated on the things I want in my life--paint palettes and sumptuous fabrics and star-flecked skies and dancing on my tiptoes and the smell of jasmine. But I usually imagine myself alone or falling in love with all kinds of different people. These days, I've started to daydream of the permanent relationships I want to have. Friends who stay in my life forever. People who I trust to love me even if I'm wobbling--the way I trust Jonah. And if that's what I want, then I have scorched Earth to till and replant. I have a Japanese maple seedling, and I have seen how beautiful a rooted life can be. But I have miles to go before I decide where to plant us.

I loved Tolkien and while I wished to have written his book, I had no desire at all to write like him. Tolkien’s words and sentences seemed like natural things, like rock formations or waterfalls, and wanting to write like Tolkien would have been, for me, like wanting to blossom like a cherry tree or climb a tree like a squirrel or rain like a thunderstorm. Chesterton was the complete opposite. I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight.

When once more alone, I reviewed the information I had got; looked into my heart, examined its thoughts and feelings, and endeavoured to bring back with a strict hand such as had been straying through imagination's boundless and trackless waste, into the safe fold of common sense. Arraigned to my own bar, Memory having given her evidence of the hopes, wishes, sentiments I had been cherishing since last night--of the general state of mind in which I had indulged for nearly a fortnight past; Reason having come forward and told, in her quiet way a plain, unvarnished tale, showing how I had rejected the real, and rapidly devoured the ideal--I pronounced judgement to this effect-- That a greater fool than Jane Eyre had never breathed the breath of life; that a more fantastic idiot had never surfeited herself on sweet lies, and swallowed poison as if it were nectar. "You," I said, "a favourite with Mr. Rochester? You're gifted with the power of pleasing him? You're of importance to him in any way? Go!--your folly sickens me. And you have derived pleasure from occasional tokens of preference--equivocal tokens shown by a gentleman of family and a man of the world to dependent and novice. How dared you? Poor stupid dupe! Could not even self-interest make you wiser? You repeated to yourself this morning the brief scene of last night? Cover your face and be ashamed! He said something in praise of your eyes, did he? Blind puppy! Open their bleared lids and look on your own accursed senselessness! It does no good to no woman to be flattered by her superior, who cannot possibly intend to marry her; and it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it; and if discovered and responded to, must lead into miry wilds whence there is no extrication. "Listen, then, Jane Eyre, to your sentence: tomorrow, place the glass before you, and draw in chalk your own pictures, faithfully, without softening on defect; omit no harsh line, smooth away no displeasing irregularity; write under it, 'Portrait of a Governess, disconnected, poor, and plain.' "Afterwards, take a piece of smooth ivory--you have one prepared in your drawing-box: take your palette, mix your freshest, finest, clearest tints; choose your most delicate camel-hair pencils; delineate carefully the loveliest face you can imageine; paint it in your softest shades and sweetest lines, according to the description given by Mrs. Fairfax of Blanche Ingram; remember the raven ringlets, the oriental eye--What! you revert to Mr. Rochester as a model! Order! No snivel!--no sentiment!--no regret! I will endure only sense and resolution... "Whenever, in the future, you should chance to fancy Mr. Rochester thinks well of you, take out these two pictures and compare them--say, "Mr. Rochester might probably win that noble lady's love, if he chose to strive for it; is it likely he would waste a serious thought on this indignent and insignifican plebian?" "I'll do it," I resolved; and having framed this determination, I grew calm, and fell asleep.

She could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of course; the colour could have been thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised; that was how Paunceforte would have seen it. But then she did not see it like that. She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral. Of all that only a few random marks scrawled upon the canvas remained. And it would never be seen; never be hung even, and there was Mr Tansley whispering in her ear, “Women can’t paint, women can’t write ...” She now remembered what she had been going to say about Mrs Ramsay. She did not know how she would have put it; but it would have been something critical. She had been annoyed the other night by some highhandedness. Looking along the level of Mr Bankes’s glance at her, she thought that no woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped; they could only seek shelter under the shade which Mr Bankes extended over them both. Looking along his beam she added to it her different ray, thinking that she was unquestionably the loveliest of people (bowed over her book); the best perhaps; but also, different too from the perfect shape which one saw there. But why different, and how different? she asked herself, scraping her palette of all those mounds of blue and green which seemed to her like clods with no life in them now, yet she vowed, she would inspire them, force them to move, flow, do her bidding tomorrow. How did she differ? What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably? She was like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness. She was willful; she was commanding (of course, Lily reminded herself, I am thinking of her relations with women, and I am much younger, an insignificant person, living off the Brompton Road). She opened bedroom windows. She shut doors. (So she tried to start the tune of Mrs Ramsay in her head.) Arriving late at night, with a light tap on one’s bedroom door, wrapped in an old fur coat (for the setting of her beauty was always that—hasty, but apt), she would enact again whatever it might be—Charles Tansley losing his umbrella; Mr Carmichael snuffling and sniffing; Mr Bankes saying, “The vegetable salts are lost.” All this she would adroitly shape; even maliciously twist; and, moving over to the window, in pretence that she must go,—it was dawn, she could see the sun rising,—half turn back, more intimately, but still always laughing, insist that she must, Minta must, they all must marry, since in the whole world whatever laurels might be tossed to her (but Mrs Ramsay cared not a fig for her painting), or triumphs won by her (probably Mrs Ramsay had had her share of those), and here she saddened, darkened, and came back to her chair, there could be no disputing this: an unmarried woman (she lightly took her hand for a moment), an unmarried woman has missed the best of life. The house seemed full of children sleeping and Mrs Ramsay listening; shaded lights and regular breathing.

An uninterrupted view of the Paris skyline was spread out before her, like a giant landscape painting rendered in shades of blue-grey, charcoal and purple-tinted umber; the dreamy palette of shifting shadows at twilight. The blue hour.

He said that mixing an omelet was a lot like mixing paint: the eggs were my basic palette, and then I could build tastes out of whatever ingredients I had around.

Sunlight dipped in raindrops, the sky painted a palette across the horizon.

But if I am going to paint my own future, then I can't have have people-pleasing on my paint palette. It only muddles the rest of the colors.

The love of the painter standing alone and staring, staring at the great coloured surface he is making. Standing with him in the room the rearing canvas stares back with tentative shapes halted in their growth, moving in a new rhythm from floor to ceiling. The twisted tubes, the fresh paint squeezed and smeared across the dry upon his palette. The dust beneath the easel. The paint has edged along the brushes' handles. The white light in a northern sky is silent. The window gapes as he inhales his world. His world: a rented room, and turpentine. He moves towards his half-born. He is in love.

Trees, skies, valleys mountains, seen through the rain-spotted windshield, were like a distorted, stippled landscape painted by a beginner who has not yet learned to wring living colour from his palette.

I will admit that I wanted to shout for standing on the top of a scaffold in front of a good new wall always goes to my head. It is a sensation something between that of an angel let out of his cage into a new sky and a drunkard turned loose in a royal cellar. And after all, what nobler elevation could you find in this world than the scaffold of a wall painter? No admiral on the bridge of a new battleship designed by the old navy, could feel more pleased with himself than Gulley, on two planks, forty feet above dirt level, with his palette table beside him, his brush in his hand, and the draught blowing up his trousers; cleared for action.

Perceptions trained in another climate and another landscape have had to be modified. That means we have had to learn to quit depending on perceptual habit. Our first and hardest adaptation was to learn all over again how to see. Our second was to learn to like the new forms and colors and light and scale when we had learned to see them. Our third was to develop new techniques, a new palette, to communicate them. And our fourth, unfortunately out of of our control, was to train an audience that would respond to what we wrote or painted.

What we say doesn’t always paint an accurate picture of what we mean. Sometimes the result is sort of abstract, open to misinterpretations. We use the colors and words on our present palette when others would paint a clearer picture.

Without the full spectrum of emotions, we are not whole human beings. We are instead like the artist whose palette only has room for light and cheery colors. Our self-expression is boring and superficial like discount store paintings, unconvincingly ethereal in their insipid feathery pastels. The “negative” emotions add dark colors to an artist’s palette. They open up an infinite range of color, hue, and tone. Without black on the palette there are no rich colors, no depths, no contrasts, no intricacies. Without the dark colors it is impossible to capture the infinitely diverse themes and landscapes of life.

God's wisdom is like the rainbow, in symmetry, beauty, and variety. He does not paint scenes merely in black and white, but uses a riot of colour from the heavenly palette in order to show the wonder of His wise dealings with His people. - Sinclair Ferguson

I know the evil that exists. I know the terrible things people do to each other. I’ve lived it. I’ve survived it. But just because I’ve seen the palette of dark colors doesn’t mean I have to paint the rest of my world that way. I can choose the bright colors instead. I can see them, paint them, draw them, surround myself with them like a loud, glorious song drowning out all the darkness in the world.

Is coffee okay? I’ve run out of tea.” Arthur nodded and sat down on the sofa. Lucy leaped up and settled on his lap. He stroked her head and she looked up at him with her orange eyes. “Where’s next on your travels?” Mike said as he placed two steaming mugs on the table. “What’s the next charm you’re trying to trace?” “I don’t know. I’m intrigued by the paint palette. And I haven’t thought about my mother-in-law for years. Or perhaps I should just stop searching. It makes my head hurt.” “You should never give up,” Mike said. “Those charms on your bracelet could be lucky.

If I were going to paint the dimension I see in front of me, I’d load my palette up with burnt umber, opaque black, a spectrum of grays—nothing brighter than that. I’d have to grind something into the paint with my thumb, some sort of grit or ash, because the grime here goes deeper than surfaces.

There will come a day, when this horror is not the only color on your palette. But that day's not now. And even if this horror becomes an accent color- a smudge of lead white to highlight a cheekbone, a bit of yellow ochre the glint on a sword- sometimes those are the pigments that change one's perception of an entire work of art.

White paint can be made of many things. It can come from chalk or zinc, barium or rice, or from little fossilized sea creatures in limestone graves. The Dutch artist Jan Vermeer even made some of his luminescent whites with a recipe that included alabaster and quartz—in lumps that took the light reflected into the painting and made it dance.3

It wasn’t until the twelfth century that blue found a place on artists’ palettes, when they began to create it through grinding up certain stones. Every Madonna in a medieval painting wore blue robes, every stained glass window contained blue. It’s as if all men decided, at once, that blue was the color of…” I mull the right word… “the divine.

White-walled once. Red-roofed. But painted in weather-colors now. With brushes dipped in nature’s palette. Mossgreen. Earth-brown. Crumbleblack

In a hundred and fifty years, Haussman will set his mark upon the city, raise a uniform facade and paint the buildings in the same pale palette, creating a testament to art, and evenness, and beauty.

Once the golden phase had passed, the sun used only the red and orange spectrum of its palette to paint the sky in advance of the long night of darkness, and by reflection the harbor waters caught fire.

Unlike musical notation, paint or clay, language is inside every one of us. For free. We are all proficient at it. We already have the palette, the paints and the instruments. We don’t have to go and buy any reserved materials. Poetry is made of the same stuff you are reading now, the same stuff you use to order pizza over the phone, the same stuff you yell at your parents and children, whisper in your lover’s ear and shove into an e-mail, text or birthday card. It is common to us all.

He did not know how much time passed. He got up, ripped the canvas off the frame, threw it into a corner, and put on a new one. He mixed some paints, sat down, and began work. One starts with a hopeless struggle to follow nature, and everything goes wrong; one ends by calmly creating from one’s palette, and nature agrees with it and follows. On croit que j’imagine—ce n’est pas vrai—je me souviens. It was just as Pietersen had told him in Brussels; he had been too close to his models. He had not been able to get a perspective. He had been pouring himself into the mould of nature; now he poured nature into the mould of himself. He painted the whole thing in the colour of a good, dusty, unpeeled potato. There was the dirty, linen table cloth, the smoky wall, the lamp hanging down from the rough rafters, Stien serving her father with steamed potatoes, the mother pouring the black coffee, the brother lifting a cup to his lips, and on all their faces the calm, patient acceptance of the eternal order of things. The sun rose and a bit of light peered into the storeroom window. Vincent got up from his stool. He felt perfectly calm and peaceful. The twelve days’ excitement was gone. He looked at his work. It reeked of bacon, smoke, and potato steam. He smiled. He had painted his Angelus. He had captured that which does not pass in that which passes. The Brabant peasant would never die.

Listen, then, Jane Eyre, to your sentence: tomorrow, place the glass before you, and draw in chalk your own picture, faithfully, without softening one defect; omit no harsh line, smooth away no displeasing irregularity; write under it, 'Portrait of a Governess, disconnected, poor, and plain.' "Afterwards, take a piece of smooth ivory--you have one prepared in your drawing-box: take your palette, mix your freshest, finest, clearest tints; choose your most delicate camel-hair pencils; delineate carefully the loveliest face you can imagine; paint it in your softest shades and sweetest lines, according to the description given by Mrs. Fairfax of Blanche Ingram; remember the raven ringlets, the oriental eye;--What! you revert to Mr. Rochester as a model! Order! No snivel!--no sentiment!--no regret! I will endure only sense and resolution. Recall the august yet harmonious lineaments, the Grecian neck and bust; let the round and dazzling arm be visible, and the delicate hand; omit neither diamond ring nor gold bracelet; portray faithfully the attire, aerial lace and glistening satin, graceful scarf and golden rose; call it 'Blanche, an accomplished lady of rank.

I'll Paint You A Rainbow I'll paint you a rainbow to hang on the wall, to brighten your heart When the gray shadows fall, On the canvas of joy outlasting the years, with a soft brush of sweetness To dry all your tears. I'll paint you a rainbow with colors of smiles That glow with sincerity over the miles. On a palette of words I will tenderly blend Tones in treasures of sunlight and wind. I'll paint the rainbow that reaches so wide, Your sighs and your sorrows will vanish inside, And deep in the center of each different hue, A memory fashioned especially for you. So lift up your eyes, for suspended above, A rainbow designed by the fingers of love.

Many say autumn is by far the most spectacular season in Lanark County. During these brief few weeks Mother Nature paints our landscape with her most vivid palette, colouring our trees with broad strokes of the richest crimsons, fiery oranges, and the sunniest yellows, leaving no doubt in anyone's mind that these sugar maples are the crown jewels of our forests.

You must tune everything else out and create from your heart." I nod, dipping my brush in red acrylic, then white, before mixing the paints on the palette until they form a perfect pink. I paint a peony, and then another. I somehow recall a garden, far away from here, where there were (are?) peonies. I remember the way the blossoms are so heavy that they flounce over, and I reach for another brush and dip it into green to get the stems just right.

Letters blend to give rise to words  Like colors pave way for the birth of million shades! Evanescence reminisces sepia! Memory takes back to black and white! Music pops hot pink! Dance rocks wine red! Marvelous is miraculous as the indigo! Magnificent is magnanimous like Russian red! Splendid is classy like arctic blue! Resplendent inspires like  strawberry pink! Flamboyance is flowery like fuchsia! Flawless is perfect like flamingo! Extraordinary stands out like lime yellow! Peculiar is unique like cyan! Pleasant pleases like periwinkle! Soothing soothes like lemonade! Opulent glitters gold! Spectacular shimmers silver! Nice is as mild as dulce de leche! Attractive dazzles onyx! Powerful is headstrong like tangerine! Puissance stupefies like scarlet red! Mellifluence is dissolving, like lavender! Sonorous sounds magenta! Lovely cutely blushes! Sweet is peachy! Richness is wealthy like lush green! Poverty is brown as in flower wilt! Candid is frank as candy red! Altruism is selfless like parmesan! But, BEAUTY IS IRIDESCENT! Which

So, Hailey give you those?” Finn asked, lifting his chin and looking at her legs. He squirted some paint from a tube onto his palette and pressed his brush into it, mixing it around. “How did you know?” Megan asked. “I know Hailey,” Finn replied, blowing away a blond curl that fell in front of his eye. “At the Fourth of July party at the town pool in second grade, she stole my Popsicle and shoved me into the deep end. I’ve been afraid if her ever since.” “Seriously?” Megan said with a smirk. “I never joke about Popsicles,” Finn replied with a half smile.

As she draws level the flickering light strikes her. But under closer scrutiny she is not the young firefox that I presumed she was. With that posture, that chin held so high, those cold beautiful eyes, that tight tapering skirt and those feet mounted on pedestals with heels like blades, how could I have been so wrong? Her hair is not blonde, but white. The dead white of the pantomime wig. That haughty catwalk face is actually more like a skull too, with aged parchment stretched across it; a dry surface freshly painted with a palette more suited to the circus clown than the city girl.

Maybe there is no single self to speak of. Maybe you're a shifting collage of many different personas, each as authentic as the next. A kaleidoscope of ever-moving fragments, reflecting a thousand little impressions of the world around you, with flashes of different moods and vibrant clusters of quirks — but no broader pattern. Maybe you have no true colors. You're not some finished painting, signed and sealed in varnish. If there is a “real you,” surely it’s the mess of paint on the palette: colors swirling and mixing and playing together, perpetually unfinished, searching and striving to make something new.

But if this biography suggests a varied and sympathetic apprehension of the world, it was with a far darker palette that Céline came to paint his word-pictures when he began writing in the late 1920’s. Straightforward fear adumbrates his invective, which — despite the reputation he would later earn as a rabid anti-Semite — is aimed against all classes and races of people with indiscriminate abandon. Indeed, if “Ulysses” is the great modernist novel most inspired by a desire for humanistic inclusion, then “Journey” is its antithesis: a stream of misanthropic consciousness, almost unrelieved by any warmth or fellow-feeling.

had found the only hippie-opera-singer-dream-cabin-in-the-woods in Westchester! It was perfection, and I knew exactly what to do to bring it to life. I took it on like I was an interior designer on one of those makeover shows. I picked out and paid for every piece of brand-new furniture, all the knickknacks and accouterments. I chose every detail, from light fixtures to paint colors, all in “Pat’s palette.” I hung wooden flower boxes outside and filled them with romantic wildflowers. I got photo prints made of her Irish family members and Irish crests, had them mounted and framed, and hung them ascending the wall along the staircase.

When light shines on a leaf, or a daub of paint, or a lump of butter, it actually causes it to rearrange its electrons, in a process called "transition." There the electrons are, floating quietly in clouds within their atoms, and suddenly a ray of light shines on them. Imagine a soprano singing a high C and shattering a wineglass, because she catches its natural vibration. Something similar happens with the electrons, if a portion of the light happens to catch their natural vibration. It shoots them to another energy level and that relevant bit of light, that glass-shattering "note," is used up and absorbed. The rest is reflected out, and our brains read it as "color.".... The best way I've found of understanding this is to think not so much of something "being" a color but of it "doing" a color. The atoms in a ripe tomato are busy shivering - or dancing or singing, the metaphors can be as joyful as the colors they describe - in such a way that when white light falls on them they absorb most of the blue and yellow light and they reject the red - meaning paradoxically that the "red" tomato is actually one that contains every wavelength except red. A week before, those atoms would have been doing a slightly different dance - absorbing the red light and rejecting the rest, to give the appearance of a green tomato instead.

What’s white people? I’m blind. Never seen the color white in my life. Or the color black, blue, or gray for that matter. To a blind man, color means nothing. My ma used to tell me that the world is like a glorious set of watercolor paints laid out in a hand crafted palette. Sure wish I could see what that is. She made is sound special. The only things I can see are bad people, good people, and those in between. The bad ones you can easily avoid, but those in between people are the worst because you never know when they’ll help you up and when they’ll kick you in the teeth. So ask me instead if I hate people, and I will tell you that some are deserving of hate and others not.

Olmsted did think about it and began to see the exposition as an opportunity to achieve something for which he had fought long and hard but almost always with disappointing results. Throughout his career he had struggled, with little success, to dispel the perception that landscape architecture was simply an ambitious sort of gardening and to have his field recognized instead as a distinct branch of the fine arts, full sister to painting, sculpture, and brick-and-mortar architecture. Olmsted valued plants, trees, and flowers not for their individual attributes but rather as colors and shapes on a palette. Formal beds offended him. Roses were not roses but “flecks of white or red modifying masses of green.” It irked him that few people seemed to understand the effects he worked so long and hard to create. “I design with a view to a passage of quietly composed, soft, subdued pensive character, shape the ground, screen out discordant elements and get suitable vegetation growing.

Others, faced with Turner's competitiveness were less contented. C.R. Leslie was on hand when Turner's Helvoetsluys, to start with "a grey pictre, beautiful and true, but with no positive colour in any part of it", was hung next to Constable's Opening of Waterloo Bridge Leslie wrote that Constable's painting looked as if painted with liquid gold and silver, and Turner came several times into the room while Constable was heightening with vermilion and lake the decorations and flags of the city barges. Turner stood behind Constable, looking from "Waterloo" to his own picture, and at last went and got his palette from the Great Room where he had been touching another picture. He then put a round daub of red lead, "somewhat bigger than a shilling, on his grey sea, [and] went away without saying a word. The intensity of the red lead, made more vivid by the coolness of his picture, caused even the vermilion and lake of Constable to look weak. I came into the room just as Turner left it. "He as been here," Said Constable, "and fired a gun.

I placed the tubes of paint on the palette and selected a small canvas. I prepared the palette with an assortment of colors, then closed my eyes, remembering the way the moors had looked when I rode into town with Lord Livingston. He'd been so different on that drive into the village before he left for London. Had that been the side of him that Lady Anna had fallen in love with? I dipped my brush into the black paint and then mixed in some white until I'd created the right shade of gray, then touched the brush to the canvas. I loved the feeling of the paintbrush in my hand. He'd been kind to buy me the art supplies, but I remembered how he'd behaved in the dining room and at other times before that. 'How could he be so cruel, so unfeeling?' Once I'd painted the clouds, I moved on to the hills, mixing a sage green color for the grass and then dotting the foreground with a bit of lavender to simulate the heather. I stepped back from the canvas and frowned. It needed something else. But what? I looked out the window to the orchard. The Middlebury Pink. 'Who took the page from Lady Anna's book? Lord Livingston?' I dabbed my brush into the brown paint and created the structure of the tree. Next I dotted the branches with its heart-shaped leaves and large, white, saucer-size blossoms with pink tips.

Whoooa! Red! Green! Yellow! Brown! Purple! Even black! Look at all those bowls full of brilliantly colored batter!" She used strawberries, blueberries, matcha powder, cocoa powder, black sesame and other natural ingredients to dye those batters. They look like a glittering array of paints on an artist's palette! "Now that all my yummy edible paints are ready... ...it's picture-drawing time!" "She twisted a sheet of parchment paper into a piping bag and is using it to draw all kinds of cute pictures!" "You're kidding me! Look at them all! How did she get that fast?!" Not only that, most chefs do rough sketches first, but she's doing it off the cuff! How much artistic talent and practice does she have?! "All these cutie-pies go into the oven for about three minutes. After that I'll take them out and pour the brown sugar batter on top..." "It appears she's making a roll cake if she's pouring batter into that flat a pan." "Aah, I see. It must be one of those patterned roll cakes you often see at Japanese bakeries. That seems like an unusually plain choice, considering the fanciful tarts she made earlier." "The decorations just have to be super-cute, too." "OOOH! She's candy sculpting!" "So pretty and shiny!" That technique she's using- that's Sucre Tiré (Pulled Sugar)! Of all the candy-sculpting arts, Sucre Tiré gives the candy a glossy, nearly glass-like luster... but keeping the candy at just the right temperature so that it remains malleable while stretching it to a uniform thickness is incredibly difficult! Every step is both delicate and exceptionally difficult, yet she makes each one look easy! She flows from one cutest technique to the next, giving each an adorable flair! Just like she insisted her apple tarts had to be served in a pretty and fantastical manner... ... she's even including cutesy performances in the preparation of this dish!

THE PARTY And at last the police are at the front door, summoned by a neighbor because of the noise, two large cops asking Peter, who had signed the rental agreement, to end the party. Our peace can’t be disturbed, one of the officers states. But when we receive a complaint we act on it. The police on the front stoop wear as their shoulder patch an artist’s palette, since the town likes to think of itself as an art colony, and indeed, Pacific Coast Highway two blocks inland, which serves as the main north-south street, is lined with commercial galleries featuring paintings of the surf by moonlight —like this night, but without anybody on the sand and with a bigger moon. And now Dennis, as at every party once the police arrive at the door, moves through the dancers, the drinkers, the talkers, to confront the uniforms and guns, to object, he says, to their attempt to stop people harmlessly enjoying themselves, and to argue it isn’t even 1 a.m. Then Stuart, as usual, pushes his way to the discussion happening at the door and in his drunken manner tries to justify to the cops Dennis’ attitude, believing he can explain things better to authority, which of course annoys Dennis, and soon those two are disputing with each other, tonight exasperating Peter, whose sole aim is to get the officers to leave before they are provoked enough to demand to enter to check ID or something, and maybe smell the pot and somebody ends up arrested with word getting back to the landlord and having the lease or whatever Peter had signed cancelled, and all staying here evicted. The Stones, or Janis, are on the stereo now, as the police stand firm like time, like death—You have to shut it down—as the dancing inside continues, the dancers forgetting for a moment a low mark on a quiz, or their draft status, or a paper due Monday, or how to end the war in Asia, or some of their poems rejected by a magazine, or the situation in Watts or of Chavez’s farmworkers, or that they wish they had asked Erin rather than Joan to dance. That dancing, that music, the party, even after the cops leave with their warning Don’t make us come back continues, the dancing has lasted for years, decades, across a new century, through the fear of nuclear obliteration, the great fires, fierce rain, Main Beach and Forest Avenue flooded, war after war, love after love, that dancing goes on, the dancing, the party, the night, the dancing

After all,” she said, her eyes meeting his, “it’s not as though you lack sufficient charm to woo ladies. And you’re certainly handsome enough, in your own way.” She bent her head again. “Oh, stop looking s smug. I’m not flattering you, I’m merely stating facts. Privateering was not your only profitable course of action. You might have married, if you’d wished to.” “Ah, but there’s the snag, you see. I didn’t wish to.” She picked up a brush and tapped it against her palette. “No, you didn’t. You wished to be at sea. You wished to go adventuring, to seize sixty ships in the name of the Crown and pursue countless women on four continents. That’s why you sold your land, Mr. Grayson. Because it’s what you wanted to do. The profit was incidental.” Gray tugged at the cuff of his coat sleeve. It unnerved him, how easily she stared down these truths he’d avoided looking in the eye for years. So now he was worse than a thief. He was a selfish, lying thief. And still she sat with him, flirted with him, called him “charming” and “handsome enough.” How much darkness did the girl need to uncover before she finally turned away? “And what about you, Miss Turner?” He leaned forward in his chair. “Why are you here, bound for the West Indies to work as a governess? You, too, might have married. You come from quality; so much is clear. And even if you’d no dowry, sweetheart…” He waited for her to look up. “Yours is the kind of beauty that brings men to their knees.” She gave a dismissive wave of her paintbrush. Still, her cheeks darkened, and she dabbed her brow with the back of her wrist. “Now, don’t act missish. I’m not flattering you, I’m merely stating facts.” He leaned back in his chair. “So why haven’t you married?” “I explained to you yesterday why marriage was no longer an option for me. I was compromised.” Gray folded his hands on his chest. “Ah, yes. The French painting master. What was his name? Germaine?” “Gervais.” She sighed dramatically. “Ah, but the pleasure he showed me was worth any cost. I’d never felt so alive as I did in his arms. Every moment we shared was a minute stolen from paradise.” Gray huffed and kicked the table leg. The girl was trying to make him jealous. And damn, if it wasn’t working. Why should some oily schoolgirl’s tutor enjoy the pleasures Gray was denied? He hadn’t aided the war effort just so England’s most beautiful miss could lift her skirts for a bloody Frenchman. She began mixing pigment with oil on her palette. “Once, he pulled me into the larder, and we had a feverish tryst among the bins of potatoes and turnips. He held me up against the shelves and we-“ “May I read my book now?” Lord, he couldn’t take much more of this. She smiled and reached for another brush. “If you wish.” Gray opened his book and stared at it, unable to muster the concentration to read. Every so often, he turned a page. Vivid, erotic images filled his mind, but all the blood drained to his groin.

But…but that’s tragic! To go through life without color? Unable to appreciate art, or beauty?” He laughed. “Now, sweet-hold your brush before you paint me a martyr’s halo. It’s not as though I’m blind. I have a great appreciation for art, as I believe we’ve discussed. And as for beauty…I don’t need to know whether your eyes are blue or green or lavender to know that they’re uncommonly lovely.” “No one has lavender eyes.” “Don’t they?” His gaze caught hers and refused to let go. Leaning forward, he continued, “Did that tutor of yours ever tell you this? That your eyes are ringed with a perfect circle a few shades darker than the rest of the…don’t they call it the iris?” Sophia nodded. “The iris.” He propped his elbow on the table and leaned forward, his gaze searching hers intently. “An apt term it is, too. There are these lighter rays that fan out from the center, like petals. And when your pupils widen-like that, right there-your eyes are like two flowers just coming into bloom. Fresh. Innocent.” She bowed her head, mixing a touch of lead white into the sea-green paint on her palette. He leaned closer still, his voice a hypnotic whisper. “But when you take delight in teasing me, looking up through those thick lashes, so saucy and self-satisfied…” She gave him a sharp look. He snapped his fingers. “There! Just like that. Oh, sweet-then those eyes are like two opera dancers smiling from behind big, feathered fans. Coy. Beckoning.” Sophia felt a hot blush spreading from her bosom to her throat. He smiled and reclined in his chair. “I don’t need to know the color of your hair to see that it’s smooth and shiny as silk. I don’t need to know whether it’s yellow or orange or red to spend an inordinate amount of time wondering how it would feel brushing against my bare skin.” Opening his book to the marked page, he continued, “And don’t get me started on your lips, sweet. If I endeavored to discover the precise shade of red or pink or violet they are, I might never muster the concentration for anything else.” He turned a leaf of his book, then fell silent. Sophia stared at her canvas. Her pulse pounded in her ears. A bead of sweat trickled down the back of her neck, channeling down between her shoulder blades, and a hot, itchy longing pooled at the cleft of her legs. Drat him. He’d known she was taunting him with her stories. And now he sat there in an attitude of near-boredom, making love to her with his teasing, colorless words in a blatant attempt to fluster her. It was as though they were playing a game of cards, and he’d just raised the stakes. Sophia smiled. She always won at cards. “Balderdash,” she said calmly. He looked up at her, eyebrow raised. “No one has violet lips.” “Don’t they?” She laid aside her palette and crossed her arms on the table. “The slope of your nose is quite distinctive.” His lips quirked in a lopsided grin. “Really.” “Yes.” She leaned forward, allowing her bosom to spill against her stacked arms. His gaze dipped, but quickly returned to hers. “The way you have that little bump at the ridge…It’s proving quite a challenge.” “Is that so?” He bent his head and studied his book. Sophie stared at him, waiting one…two…three beats before he raised his hand to rub the bridge of his nose. Quite satisfactory progress, that. Definite beginnings of fluster.

Sophia counted six clangs of the bell before Mr. Grayson jolted fully awake. He looked up at her, startled and flushed. As though he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t. She smiled. Rubbing his eyes, he rose to his feet. “Will I shock you, Miss Turner, if I remove my coat?” Sophia felt a twinge of disappointment. When would he stop treating her with this forced politesse, maintaining this distance between them? How many tales of passionate encounters must she spin before he finally understood that she was no less wicked than he, only less experienced? Perhaps it was time to take more aggressive measures. “By all means, remove your coat.” She tilted her eyes to cast him a saucy look. “Mr. Grayson, I’m not an innocent schoolgirl. You will have to try harder than that to shock me.” His lips curved in a subtle smile. “I’ll take that under advisement.” She watched as he shook the heavy topcoat from his shoulders and peeled it down his arms. He draped the coat over the back of a chair before sitting back down. The damp lawn of his shirt clung to his shoulders and arms. A pleasant shiver rippled down to Sophia’s toes. “It doesn’t suit you anyway,” she said, loading her brush with paint. He gave her a bemused look as he unknotted his cravat and pulled it loose. She inwardly rejoiced. Now, if only she could convince him to do away with his waistcoat…” “The coat,” she explained, when his eyebrows remained raised. “It doesn’t suit you.” “Why not? Is the color wrong?” The sudden seriousness in his tone surprised her. “No, the color is perfectly fine. It’s the cut that’s unflattering. That style is tailored to gentlemen of leisure, lean and slender. But as you are so fond of telling me, Mr. Grayson, you are no gentleman. Your shoulders are too broad for fashion.” “Is that so?” He chuckled as he undid his cuffs. Sophia stared as he turned up his sleeves, baring one tanned muscled forearm, then the other. “What style of garments would best suit me, then?” “Other than a toga?” He rewarded her jest with an easy smile. Sophia dabbed at her canvas, pleased to be making progress at last. “I think you need something less restrictive. Something like a sailor’s garb. Or perhaps a captain’s.” “Truly?” His gaze became thoughtful, then searching. “And even dressed in plain seaman’s clothes, would you still find me handsome enough? In my own way?” “No.” She allowed his brow to crease a moment before continuing. “I should find you surpassingly handsome. In every way.” She mixed paint slowly on her palette and gave him a coy look. “And what of my attire? If you had your way, how would you dress me?” “If I had my way…I wouldn’t.” A thrill raced through Sophia’s body. Her cheeks burned, and her eyes dropped to her lap. She forced her gave back up to meet his. Now was not the moment to lose courage. Nothing held sway over a man’s intentions like jealousy. “Gervais once kept me naked for an entire day so he could paint me.” He blinked. “He painted a nude study of you?” “No. He painted me. I took off my clothes and stretched out on the bed while he dressed me in pigment. Gervais called me his perfect, blank canvas. He painted lavender orchids here”-she traced a small circle just above her breast-“and little vines twining down…” She slid her hand down and noted with delight how his eyes followed its path. “I feigned the grippe and refused to bathe for a week.” Desire and jealous rage warred in his countenance, yet he remained as immobile as one of Lord Elgin’s marble sculptures. What would it take to spur the man into action?

She returned to the floor, and a tray appeared beside her with a sandwich, glass of milk, and some cubes of cantaloupe. She didn't know who brought it in, but she picked up a piece of the cantaloupe and examined it. The color matched some of the roses in the lady's garden, exactly what she needed for the flowers she'd drawn behind her butterfly. Yellow, white, and a dab of red- she combined them on the plate until a soft peach colored her palette. Walter thought she should grow up, like the lady wanted Oliver to do, but grown-ups didn't spend their nights dancing in gardens. Or painting. "I will stay a girl forever," she whispered, changing the lyrics from 'Peter Pan.' "And be banished if I don't." She began to paint her butterfly. "I'll never grow up," she chanted as she worked. It wasn't until the first rays of dawn spilled across her paper that she began to feel sleepy. Her floor was covered with pictures and papers, but where others might see a mess, she saw a new world. There were flowers and trees and butterflies she'd brought to life with her hands. And her heart. A lot of people thought she wasn't good at anything, but it wasn't true. She was good at making things.

All art including essayistic writing is essentially historical. A writer paints a story with a palette drawn from the well of personal experience and the product of their dream works. A writer’s sense of empathy, philosophy, and accessibility springs from the writer’s clipboard of inchoate childhood experiences bookend with teenage and adulthood’s adventures, chores, mishaps, comedic events, and tragedies.

The back door closed as Megan came around the house, and she saw Finn cross the yard and head into the toolshed again. Megan wheeled her bike over to the side wall and propped it up with the others. She paused for a moment, listening. There was no noise. Nothing. What was he doing in there? God, I really hope it doesn’t involve a stack of Playboys or something, Megan thought, grimacing. Still, even with that disgusting thought in her mind, she couldn’t help giving in to her curiosity. Besides, she was supposed to be immersing. Part of that was finding out what guys did when they were by themselves in a toolshed, right? Bracing herself, Megan walked over to the door and pulled it open. Finn whirled around, his eyes wide, and stared at her. He was wearing a blue T-shirt that read Good Boys Vote and it was dotted with fingerprints of purple paint. His hair was a little more mussed than usual. “Okay, life flashing before my eyes,” he said, letting out a breath. “You scared the crap outta me.” “Sorry,” Megan said. Something in her mind told her that she should just back out of the room, but she was too stunned to move. Finn was not, thank goodness, doing anything unsavory. He was holding a paint palette and a brush and standing in front of a canvas. Around him, behind him, on the floor, and leaning against the walls were dozens of other canvases, all in various stages of completion.

Finn looked up at Megan and suddenly she felt totally self-conscious. But she meant everything she had said. She knew she was right. But something about the way he was looking at her was making her feel like he could see under her skin. “Can I paint you?” Finn asked. Megan blinked. “Okay, that’s basically the last thing I ever thought you were gonna say.” Finn was on his feet and removing Kayla’s painting from the easel before the rush of heat had eased from Megan’s face. Suddenly he was a flurry of motion, cleaning brushes, squirting paint onto his palette, crumpling paper towels and launching them toward an overflowing trash can in the corner. “So, can I?” he asked. “Uh…I guess,” Megan said, already feeling awkward. If there was one thing Megan wasn’t, it was a model. She had never seen a freckle-faced, broad-shouldered, thick-calved girl in the pages of Tracy’s fashion mags. Not once. Finn was busily arranging his easel, which faced the back wall. Megan started to push herself off her stool. “Should I--?” “No! No. Stay right there,” Finn said. He picked up his easel and turned it so that the back of the contraption was facing her and her stool. “That’s good. I like the light right there.” Megan glanced up at the skylight and the blue sky beyond. “Am I gonna have to sit still for this?” she asked. “’Cuz I’m not very good at that.” Finn grinned and peeked at her over the top of his clean canvas. “Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out.” Megan sat and watched Finn as he worked, sketching her outline, the pencil scraping lightly against the cloth. He was riveted, concentrating, but his arms and hands seemed to move of their own volition. Watching him was mesmerizing. Even when he looked up at her, she found that she couldn’t tear her eyes away. She kept catching his glance, looking directly into his eyes. Megan’s skin grew warm under his intense scrutiny. She lifted her ponytail off the back of her neck to get some air and the ends of her hair tickled her skin. Her breath came quick and shallow. “You okay?” he asked. Megan instantly blushed and averted her gaze. “Yeah, fine.” “’Cuz we can stop if you don’t want to do this,” Finn replied. “No, I’m…I’m okay,” Megan said. Truth be told, everything inside her and around her felt charged. She could have sat there all day. “Good,” Finn said. Megan’s whole body felt a pleasant, tingling warmth. For a split second, neither of them moved.

Tears! Orbs of tears queue behind the closed eyelid                                                And slide down gently from the eyelash.. Like raindrops, that cascade and fall, From the greenish needles of fine fescues.. It isn't just a drop! It's an ocean of incessant disappointments and despondence... That storms violently ,when the heart bleeds! It's a salty sea of pain, shrunken to a drop,              To hide the magnitude of melancholy in the heart!                               POEM

These trends culminate in the Narmer Palette. Its very form harks back to a time when wandering cattle herders lived a seminomadic existence, carrying everything they needed with them and using their own bodies as canvasses for their art. In such a society, face paint played a central role in the ritual life of the community, and cosmetic palettes were a favorite and prized possession. But by Narmer’s time, the palette had been transformed into a vehicle for proclaiming the omnipotence and divinity of the king. The

I sucked in the pungent air and a palette knife of pain sliced through my skull as though my brain were a glob of acrylic paint.

Blue fabric (Water,from a different perspective) The blue fabric draping the globe, With green patches hither and thither! Is the most resplendent robe, A planet can ever wear... This blue fabric is knit, Joining skerrick,noble orbs of blue, That dribble from the Paradise,sheeny and nitid, Enveloping the planet with their glassy dew!   POEM

Chauvet Cave: The Discovery of the World’s Oldest Paintings, Jean-Marie Chauvet

She had always painted people as a way of understanding them, using her figure studies as a form of dialogue. Now, she felt compelled to choose subjects that demanded nothing of her in return. The composition was simple, naive even, the forms crudely drawn, the palette limited.

It was so arrogant of the sun to dare shine on a November day, but well, that was the sun of Gurupi: it never asked for permission to shine. It followed its own palette and it didn’t seem to give a damn whether it was the type of sun people write poems about. But Jo knew that at the end of the day, the sun always apologized for its selfishness and offered everyone in Gurupi the most beautiful sunset, with astonishing combinations of colors. The striking sun painted days of Gurupi with hopelessness, forming ochre landscapes – but the sun would always end those days with a spectacle, and Jo would always forgive it.

I do not think here of the strong colours of the common paint-box, like crimson-lake and prussian-blue, much as I exulted and still exult in them. For another boy called Robert Louis Stevenson has messed about with my colours upon that sort of palette; and I have grown up to enjoy them in print as well as in paint.

The case is velvet-lined. The brushes are polished wood. The paint colours are fabulous. It reminds me of my Urban Decay eye palette.

His bath chamber across the main room was all that remained, so I backtracked and entered it. The extravagance to which I was accustomed within the Hytanican palace did not range so far as to include the depth and size of his bath, nor the unusual mosaic tiles set into the floor. But what struck me the most were the shelves filled with ointments and bandages, and the long table against the wall that was similar to what one would find in a physician’s examination room. He had in many ways grown up a prince, but this chamber was more telling of his past than all the finery in his wardrobe. When I returned to the parlor, I felt strangely cold. Narian had once more taken up his place on the sofa, and I went to sit at his feet, wanting to be closer to the fire. He swung around and put one leg on each side of me, then started to massage my back. After a few minutes, he slipped down behind me to wrap his arms around my waist, and I leaned against him. He was warm and safe and all that I wanted. At times I felt that there was no world outside of him, and it was the best feeling I ever had. This was one of those times. “Were you ever happy here?” I softly inquired. “Yes,” he answered after a moment of thought. “I was--here in the temple.” Though I had not handled seeing Miranna’s room very well, I again had a surge of curiosity about the Overlord’s Hall, which Narian had subtly referenced. But I did not ask him to take me there--seeing it would not help me, and it would not help him. He needed to forget that place. “Then tell me something about your childhood. Something pleasant.” I closed my eyes, feeling the vibration of his chest as he began to speak. “I remember when that mural on my wall was painted. I was perhaps six or seven. The High Priestess commissioned an artist, and gave her freedom to paint something colorful and unique, something that would amuse me. I was permitted to watch, but at that age…” “Watching wasn’t enough,” I guessed, and he laughed. “The artist was on a ladder, and she had her palette with her, but she’d left the majority of her paints on the floor. I was into them before she could say a word, and I spread paint everywhere. In my hair, on my clothes, the floors, the wall where she was trying to create her masterpiece, everywhere.” He was reminiscing now instead of just telling me a story, seeing it unfold in his mind. “I’d forgotten, honestly forgotten, that I’d been told not to touch the paints. Nan was furious--we were supposed to go to a banquet that night and I’d--” “Nan?” I asked, and he tensed for a moment. “That’s what I used to call the High Priestess, when I was young.” Smiling at the idea, I nestled against him and said, “Go on.” He continued the story, and I listened contentedly, eventually falling asleep in his embrace.

scenes from the Legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table many lovely pictures have been painted, showing much diversity of figures and surroundings, some being definitely sixth-century British or Saxon, as in Blair Leighton’s fine painting of the dead Elaine; others—for example, Watts’ Sir Galahad—show knight and charger in fifteenth-century armour; while the warriors of Burne Jones wear strangely impracticable armour of some mystic period. Each of these painters was free to follow his own conception, putting the figures into whatever period most appealed to his imagination; for he was not illustrating the actual tales written by Sir Thomas Malory, otherwise he would have found himself face to face with a difficulty. King Arthur and his knights fought, endured, and toiled in the sixth century, when the Saxons were overrunning Britain; but their achievements were not chronicled by Sir Thomas Malory until late in the fifteenth century. Sir Thomas, as Froissart has done before him, described the habits of life, the dresses, weapons, and armour that his own eyes looked upon in the every-day scenes about him, regardless of the fact that almost every detail mentioned was something like a thousand years too late. Had Malory undertaken an account of the landing of Julius Caesar he would, as a matter of course, have protected the Roman legions with bascinet or salade, breastplate, pauldron and palette, coudiére, taces and the rest, and have armed them with lance and shield, jewel-hilted sword and slim misericorde; while the Emperor himself might have been given the very suit of armour stripped from the Duke of Clarence before his fateful encounter with the butt of malmsey. Did not even Shakespeare calmly give cannon to the Romans and suppose every continental city to lie majestically beside the sea? By the old writers, accuracy in these matters was disregarded, and anachronisms were not so much tolerated as unperceived. In illustrating this edition of “The Legends of King Arthur and his Knights,” it has seemed best, and indeed unavoidable if the text and the pictures are to tally, to draw what Malory describes, to place the fashion

These images would be the envy of art galleries around the world today, or Madison Avenue marketeers—rich, vibrant, and ingenious. You can almost see them move and ripple in the flickering firelight that once illuminated the cave walls as the Cro–Magnon artists stood with their palettes of primordial paints and dyes, dabbing the walls, extracting the beasts from their minds and applying their images to the rock. What powerful magic this must have been to the painter and those who witnessed the work. How could any creature imagine such things and then make them appear right before your very eyes? What hidden powers could enable a living thing to consciously and purposefully create beauty out of nothing more than the popping of the synapses in his head?

The leaves of his albums were masterpieces. The colors! And the way in which they ranged across the page, each one a dab from the palette of a Turner. “They began, of course, with the black issues of 1840. But soon the black warms to brown, the brown to red, the red to orange, the orange to bright carmine; on to indigo, and Venetian red—a bright blossoming of color, as if to paint the bursting into bloom of the Empire itself. There’s glory for you!

Humans can't be boiled down to a label or a one-word answer, so good or evil are not enough. We have likes and dislikes, hobbies and passions, love and hatred, some of which are good, others are evil, and still others are somewhere in between. The world isn't black and white, it's glorious bursting color, and we all have a palette with which to paint a masterpiece.

Twelve years ago I left Boston and New York, and moved east and west at the same time. East, to a little village in Devon, England, a town I’ve been familiar with for years, since my friends Brian and Wendy Froud and Alan Lee all live there. It had long been my dream to live in England, so I finally bought a little old cottage over there. But I decided, both for visa and health reasons, living there half the year would be better than trying to cope with cold, wet Dartmoor winters. At that point, Beth Meacham had moved out to Arizona, and I discovered how wonderful the Southwest is, particularly in the wintertime. Now I spend every winter-spring in Tucson and every summer-autumn in England. Both places strongly affect my writing and my painting. They’re very opposite landscapes, and each has a very different mythic history. In Tucson, the population is a mix of Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Euro-Americans of various immigrant backgrounds — so the folklore of the place is a mix of all those things, as well as the music and the architecture. The desert has its own colors, light, and rhythms. In Devon, by contrast, it’s all Celtic and green and leafy, and the color palette of the place comes straight out of old English paintings — which is more familiar to me, growing up loving the Pre-Raphaelites and England’s ‘Golden Age’ illustrators. I’ve learned to love an entirely different palette in Arizona, where the starkness of the desert is offset by the brilliance of the light, the cactus in bloom, and the wild colors of Mexican decor.

See, I have this theory that humans are just living, breathing, talking forms of art, each crafted with a different technique and carved out of different materials. Each beautiful in their own way. And sure, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and totally subjective, and changes depending on your circumstance, yada-yada-yada… but most of the time, it’s pretty easy to classify people. Like, okay, you know those women who are gorgeous and never know it? Or the men who pass quietly through life, handsome and unnoticed, never begging for attention or crying out for recognition? Those are your watercolors. And the loud, vivacious, gorgeous-and-they-know-it creatures, with bright lipstick and closets full of bold colors and outfits they never wear twice? Acrylics. The graceful, elegant, aging beauties you pick out in the crowd, or across the cafe, the lines on their faces telling a story you just know you’d want to hear, with so many layers and smudges, twists and turns, you’re not even sure where they begin? Charcoals. Then, you’ve got the big-picture-beautiful people, with the collection of interesting features that together make a beautiful face. They’re your oil paintings — best from ten feet away and, at the end of the day, kind of funny looking if you lean closer and analyze all their elements separately. But I’m quickly learning that Chase Croft doesn’t fit any of my categories. He isn’t a brushstroke on canvas, or bumpy layers of paint on a palette, or imperfect lines scratched inside a sketchbook. His features aren’t just gorgeous as a collective — he’s one of those annoyingly attractive people whose every feature is equally stunning. He’s a sculpture.

It would be interesting if some real authority investigated carefully the part which memory plays in painting. We look at the object with an intent regard, then at the palette, and thirdly at the canvas. The canvas receives a message dispatched usually a few seconds before from the natural object. But it has come through a post office en route. It has been transmitted in code. It has been turned from light into paint. It reaches the canvas a cryptogram. Not until it has been placed in its correct relation to everything else that is on the canvas can it be deciphered, is its meaning apparent, is it translated once again from mere pigment into light. And the light this time is not of Nature but of Art.

People with an impoverished vocabulary live an impoverished emotional life; people with rich vocabularies have a multihued palette of colors with which to paint their experience, not only for others, but for themselves as well.

After a couple of hours she breathlessly put aside her palette knife and asked, ‘Did you ever experiment with your handwriting?’ I thought about this as Jacinta poured herself a glass of milk from a carton. ‘I suppose so. Once I wasn’t being forced to use joined up writing with a fountain pen any more. Why?’ ‘You sent me a few of my old exercise books from school after you cleared out Mum’s place a few years ago. Do you remember?’ I told her I didn’t. Maybe David had posted them to her. ‘When I was at primary school I wrote using the whole wide line. The capitals touched the top and everything was balloony, you know, round and chipper. But my handwriting in the later exercise books, I think I must have been fourteen or so, was completely truncated like inky footprints made by ants. I could hardly make out what I’d written. I don’t know how the teachers deciphered it. I still don’t quite know what comes naturally when I write. I don’t have a style. It changes. Sometimes it’s all swallowed up and at other times I write using tall, spindly letters. Maybe it’s the pen and paper I’m using. That makes a difference.’ ‘Yeah, it does,’ I agreed. ‘I hate thin-ruled paper.’ She took a gulp from her milk. The light was behind her. I couldn’t see her features. Her hair was pulled back into a low ponytail like the one she wore to school for years. I hated Mum. I hated Pete. I hated Gavin. I hated myself. Jacinta said, ‘When I paint I have a signature. It’s my own and I don’t have to be afraid.’ ‘I’m sorry, Jacinta. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what to do.’ ‘I don’t blame you. But I thought you’d forgotten. Or forgiven. Or a bit of both.’ ‘A bit of both,’ I admitted. She was quiet, began to clean up. I didn’t help. I just watched. And eventually she turned back to me and said, ‘How’s Zoey?

Impressionism brings nominalism into painting. One of the cardinal tenets of the doctrine is that outline does not exist in nature. Consequently, the main object was “the ultimate divorce of the picture from any convention, whether of arrangement, of drawing, or of a fixed palette.”5 At

A Magic Hour’s Dreaming by Stewart Stafford Is there a sight more fair than wheaten fields, Awaiting the sun's ambush to potently ignite? Colour vibrates beyond the eye revealed, To live, dance and breathe in honeyed light. Nature’s palette, painted hues so bright, Invites the bees to sip and man to dream, Of engineered art, dazzling to the sight, Authored lightning in a celestial seam. The creator’s canvas, mint beyond decay, Invites the inner child to replenish at source, Where Nature’s staff casts shadows away, Friendships bond as a trickling stream's course. An eyeblink flash carved in history's tree, Treasured riches pooled of those by our side. For in sepia’s sunflower memory, We court the hand of an agreeable bride. Fading birdsong underscores this bottled time, In butterfly hearts, the hourglass stilled sublime. Autumn's leaves, ochre embers, curtsied fall, Farewell Summer, until roused in New Year's call. © 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.

Let us live by dreams and for dreams, undoing the Universe and remaking it, distractedly, as best suits our moment to dream. Let us do this conscious of its utter futility. Let us ignore life with every pore of our body, stray from reality with all of our senses, and abdicate from love with all our soul. Let us fill with useless sand the pitchers we take to the well, then empty them out, only to refill them and empty them again; the more futile the better. Let us weave garlands and, once they're finished, carefully, meticulously unpick them. Let us choose paints and mix them on the palette with no canvas before us to paint. Let us send for stone to chisel when we have no chisel and we are not sculptors. Let us render everything absurd and adorn our sterile hours with more utilities. Let us play hide and seek with our consciousness of being alive. Let us, with an amused, incredulous smile on our lips, listen to God telling us that we exist. Let us watch Time painting the world and finding the resulting picture not only false but hollow. Let us think with sentences that contradict one another, speaking out loud in sounds that aren’t colours. Let us affirm - and grasp, which would be impossible - that we are conscious of not being conscious, and that we are not what we are. Let us explain all this in an obscure, paradoxical way, saying that things have a divine, othersidedness to them, and let us not believe too much in that explanation so that we do not have to discard it. Let us carve out of empty silence all our dreams of speaking. Let us allow all our thoughts of action to slide into stagnant torpor. Yet dreamed landscapes are merely the smoke from known landscapes and the tedium of dreaming them is almost as great as the tedium of looking at the world. And hovering distractedly above all this, like a vast blue sky, the horror of living.

Artists are not born out of love. It’s the absence of love that gives birth to this anguish, agony, resentment, fury and an hour-long conversation within the loneliness of an empty ribcage. It’s the quest for love, for recognition and then the set back leaving the artist aghast because none of that matters anymore. He has wandered way too far on this illicit lane of human psyche. You do not eat the forbidden apple and artists always do that, only to live a life cursed by their own romance with the sadness of a vain destination. It’s dangerous to be this close to an artist where you keep his name on the tip of your tongue, hold yellow in your fist, and stare at the bewildering starry night. There’s chaos, so much of it that you hear his screams in his letters to Theo, you see him in the cracks of the palette of dried water paint. There are a few things that we do not want to share with anyone. That's where the heart is.

Just being near all these beautiful books reminds me of the feeling I get when I'm in front of a blank canvas holding a palette filled smears of colorful paint. I run my fingers across the smooth paper jackets of the spines, sinking into daydreams of the worlds and characters hidden between the covers, until I stop at Spin the Dawn, one of my absolute favorites, with one of the most gorgeous covers I've ever seen.

Even more threatening to Christian assumptions than the Qur’an’s flat denial that Jesus had been crucified, however, was the imperious, not to say terrifying, tone of authority with which it did so. Very little in either the Old or the New Testament could compare. For all the reverence with which Christians regarded their scripture, and for all that they believed it illumined by the flame of the Holy Spirit, they perfectly accepted that most of it, including the Gospels themselves, had been authored by mortals. Only the covenant on the tablets of stone, given to Moses amid fire and smoke on the summit of Sinai, ‘and written with the finger of God’,13 owed nothing to human mediation. Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that Moses, of all the figures in the Old and New Testaments, should have featured most prominently in the Qur’an. He was mentioned 137 times in all. Many of the words attributed to him had served as a direct inspiration to Muhammad’s own followers. ‘My people! Enter the Holy Land which God has prescribed for you!’14 The Arab conquerors, in the first decades of their empire, had pointedly referred to themselves as muhajirun: ‘those who have undertaken an exodus’. A hundred years on from Muhammad’s death, when the first attempts were made by Muslim scholars to write his biography, the model that they instinctively reached for was that of Moses. The age at which the Prophet had received his first revelation from God; the flight of his followers from a land of idols; the way in which—directly contradicting the news brought to Carthage in 634—he was said to have died before entering the Holy Land: all these elements echoed the life of the Jews’ most God-favoured prophet.15 So brilliantly, indeed, did Muslim biographers paint from the palette of traditions told about Moses that the fading outlines of the historical Muhammad were quite lost beneath their brushstrokes. Last and most blessed of the prophets sent by God to set humanity on the straight path, there was only the one predecessor to whom he could properly be compared. ‘There has come to him the greatest Law that came to Moses; surely he is the prophet of this people.’16

She painted this blush. Emotions were her palette. They were hers to borrow, not own.

Everything she did, even paintings without any humans in them, can be read as a variation on a self-portrait – they’re all reflections of her inner world, a place of acute sensitivity not only to the people but to the places she came into contact with.

In other words, you have a palette with only black, white, and grays. You will thinly paint the grisaille with these, or mixtures of these. Use your value scale to determine the value of each color in the composition and match it with the gray of the same value on your palette. Paint it in. Paint the entire composition in grays, matching values of colors with grays. Be meticulous in your matching. Be accurate. Take your time to get this right. Getting this right ensures that the next step will be a success. If you get the values right, just about everything else can go wrong and it will still be a good painting. You will know when you have finished the grisaille when it resembles a black and white photo.

Zorn’s palette but in his self-portrait his palette holds the colors white, ochre, red, and black. A mix of ochre and black produces a green. The black can be mixed with white for a kind of blue. In both cases, the intensity of the green and blue appears more saturated by adjacent colors which trick the eye into perceiving more color than is actually there. This palette teaches great resourcefulness.

Each palette teaches color mixing. Some have advantages, some limitations. Get to know what those are. The Zorn palette, in particular, teaches resourcefulness. The impressionist palette can teach the vibrancy of lighting effects. The “modern” palette can teach the importance of restraint. You will find the colors that “speak” to you, that work for you, that you have an affinity for.

Monet put it, “The most important thing is to know how to use the colors.” Get to know your colors by learning how to mix any color you want from the palette you choose.

Impression, Sunrise”, which gave rise to the term “impressionism”. He described his palette this way: “As for the colors I use, what's so interesting about that? I don't think one could paint better or more brightly with another palette. The most important thing is to know how to use the colors. Their choice is a matter of habit. In short, I use white lead, cadmium yellow, vermilion, madder, cobalt blue, chrome green. That's all." (Author’s Note: Cadmium yellow deep was used to mix the palette above.)

The grisaille (gree-zah-yuh) is like painting a black and white picture of the scene. In fact, if you have your smart phone available, take a photo and, in the photo app, you can quickly remove the color to get a black and white version of the scene. This is not a bad practice because it gives you a quick look at the values. Still you need to determine the values for yourself. You need to know how to determine values by using some kind of value scale. Start by squeezing a pile of white paint at the top of your palette and a pile of black paint (mixture of burnt umber and blue, or premixed black) at the bottom. Between the white and the black, mix up at least three values of gray, ranging in value from white to black.

Sometimes from the sea of sadness... arises an aura of light...that closes the door to the melancholy in eyes....it shuts all that is burnt in the battles...and reveals the unburnt and alive.....sometimes from the sea of black and white....arises a painting that portrays the colors....only to carry you to a door of beauty.....for it washes out the dull rain and brings the vivid inside.....and your soul becomes the palette....for your forgotten dreams come to life..... A world of possibilities open for your finger holds the brush....as your eyes envision the beauty beyond despair.....for an imagination arises from the sea of hopelessness.... What once waned as the long lost dreams....forsaken like the dust on the quaint trunk.....is now touched by your soul of colors....for you have engaged in an art.....from the hearth of emotions.....Shaken is the dust,, for the dullness is washed... and the gray is there no more....for there comes the spring rain on your soul....

Tassi was eventually found guilty of the rape of a virgin. He was held in prison for eight months and exiled from Rome for five years, but as he was close to the Pope and his nephew, this was never enforced. The trial didn’t seem to have affected his career: he was commissioned to paint murals in the Pallavicini-Rospigliosi

If she had access to a mirror, a palette, an easel and paint, a woman could endlessly reflect on her face, and, by extension, her place in the world.

To put the ensuing craze for mirrors in perspective: in the early sixteenth century an elaborate Venetian mirror was more valuable than a painting by one of the giants of the Renaissance, Raphael, and at the end of the seventeenth century, in France, the Countess of Fiesque swapped a piece of land for a mirror. In 1684 the Hall of Mirrors was completed at the Palace of Versailles: it was comprised of more than 300 panes of mirrored glass, so that royalty could see their glory reflected seemingly to infinity.

If it is true that this is the first portrait of an artist at work, it could be because she came from the northern tradition which specialized in depictions of St Luke painting the Virgin, and she had the wit to adapt this example of a working artist for herself.

But if I'm going to paint my own future, then I can't have people- pleasing my pain palette. It only muddles the rest of the colors.

Woman— the reason God painted the sky a ray of blues. Did you notice the stars I asked the Lord to hang for you in the night? Well, you’ll have to forgive me—I felt a need to express myself for you, so I used the heavens as a palette to write. A love letter, woman, that would never ever die. The heavens bow down to you, the earth gives way to who you are, woman: the celebration of my heart.