Photo: Winsor & Newton
Like many people, I am fascinated by green in all its many shades — perhaps not surprisingly, since the human eye is said to detect more shades of green than any other hue. As Vision Boutique puts it: ‘Each primary color resembles or matches up to a specific wavelength. The color blue is at the bottom of the wavelength range, while red is at the top. Right in the middle is, you guessed it, green. The center of our visual range or visual spectrum is where our perception is best. So, green is the color we see the easiest.’ Just as interesting is the meaning we assign to green — the subject of an article on the Winsor & Newton website. Among other things, we learn that the sitter in the Mona Lisa painting is wearing a green dress, and that this signifies her probable status as gentry, since the nobility wore red. Presumably the nobles wore other colours as well, but if you were showing off for an oil painting, you’d want to wear the top colour permitted to your rank. Sumptuary laws, which govern who may wear what, are always interesting. How lucky we are that we can wear whatever colours we like, and decorate our homes with them, too. I certainly don’t qualify as gentry!
It has been written that the English painter and engraver, Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) was not very fond of green. I’m not sure that this is really true, but it may be that he had a talent for seeing the less obvious colours in any landscape. It may be that amateur observers of nature paint a lot of green because that’s what they expect to see. Even when one wants to show something as very green — such as my Bucida buceras of the previous blog post — there’s usually a lot of complexity. My twinned trees were painted with six or so different green shades, from near-black to sherbet green (and I added black for depth). I also added a touch of orange beneath some of the green to incorporate observed colour (in the tiny flowers) without actually making the orange visible. But really, I stuck with green, and just made it highly varied. The lawn below, by contrast, is just one stick of hard green pastel lightly applied. In any case, I do love using green, and looking at it!