Summer Palette Quotes

I’m just trying to imagine you in flannel pink sock monkey pajamas. I’m sure you look stunning in pink. (Damien) Actually, with his skin tone he probably does look really good in it. I would definitely say he’s an autumn. (Kish) That’s summer, you dweeb. (Damien) I find it fascinating that you two women know that color palettes for clothes have a name. The fact you corrected him really scares me. (Sin)

And what of all these spices? They're worth a pretty fortune." She waves a juddering arm across the table, at the tins and glass jars and earthenware pots. All at once a shaft of thin northern light swoops over them, jolting them into luminous life: bubbled glass jars of briny green peppercorns, salted capers, gleaming vanilla pods, rusted cinnamon sticks, all leaping and glinting. The sudden startling beauty of it, the palette of hues--ocher, terra-cotta, shades of earth and sand and grass---the pale trembling light. All thoughts of running a boardinghouse vanish. I reach for a jar, lift its cork lid. The scent of bark, earth, roots, sky. And for a second I am somewhere else. "The mysterious scent of a secret kingdom," I murmur. The jar contains little pellets, brown, spherical, unexotic. How marvelous that something so plain can have such an enthralling perfume, I think. "Oh, Miss Eliza. Always the poetess! It's only allspice." Cook gives a wan smile and gestures at the ceiling, where long bunches of herbs hang from a rack. Rosemary, tansy, sage, nettles, woodruff. "And what of these? All summer I was collecting these and they still ain't properly dry." "May I lower it?" Not waiting for an answer I wind down the rack until the drying herbs are directly in front of me---a farmyard sweetness, a woody sappy scent, the smell of bruised apples and ripe earth and crushed ferns.

Fruit trees offered ripe treats from apples to fat pomegranates bursting with seeds, to various citruses. Mist floated above soil near the center, and frost coated the petals of the flowers on the right. The artist’s palette was dark, yet muted. The scene alive, yet frozen. Summer inhabited one side and it was ice-kissed with winter on the other.

Winter brings a colder palette with more heavy blue and violet, Fall has substantial more reddish and brown, Summer brings a variation of pastel colours and Spring fresh green and tangerine.

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.

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.