Mt. Tam watercolor for Laura Austin Wiley, 4 x 6”

I ran my original watercolor thru a cartoon app

Seeing Blue is a Modern Concept? Bah!

Tech Insider is flogging a video version of that annotated Radiolab post (a takeoff of a 2011 BBC production) on the newness of the idea of the word origin for blue by proclaiming: "No one could see the color blue until modern times." Wait a minute! They cite the research of Jules Davidoff, a psychologist from Goldsmiths University of London, on a Namibian tribe. His area of expertise is object recognition, color, naming, cognitive neuropsychology. Not art. Yeah, right. Are we having a leap of logic?

Tech Insider's coffee table video pompously opens with that famous, yet troublesome Homeric image, ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον, epi oinopa ponton, the wine-dark sea. As if that phrase alone were proof-positive that no one in the ancient world could actually see, let alone, name the color blue. They (Grace Raver and Kevin Loria) built a hypothesis upon that harebrained notion:

Zeus had blasted and shattered his swift ship with a bright lightning bolt, out on the wine-dark sea. —Homer, The Odyssey, Book V

Homer was using metaphor, or rather, metalepsis—ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον, translated as the wine-dark sea—was not meant to represent blue. It was translated into English from the Archaic Ionic Greek. Things get lost in translation. According to Homer's modern translator, American poet, Robert Fitzgerald, the literal translation is ''wine-faced (or facing) sea.'' From οἶνος wine + ὄψ 'face. But when he translated The Odyssey, Fitzgerald went along with Andrew Lang's 1880s prose interpretation, the wine-dark sea—because it sounded good. And the wine-dark sea has been with us ever since.

Homer, reputed to be blind, named the iridescent metallic sheen of the sea—ερυθρός erythrós, a tawny-red hue of bronze, and the copper-coloured sky, which paired nicely with the wine-faced sea. Homer's literal color palette was named after things of extreme value in the ancient world: bronze, copper, wine. It was about evoking the personification of wealth. Oh, and the Bronze Sea is also an euphemism for the Red Sea (named for its red plankton blooms).

And while we're quibbling, The Odyssey wasn't a book, it was an epic poem from the oral tradition. In ancient Greek, there was κυάνεος kyaneos a dark shade of blue, and γλαυκός, glaukos (or glafkós), pale blue with a pastel hue. (Minos' son, Glaukos, builder of Jason's ship, the Argo, who loved Scylla, ate a divine herb and was changed into a blue-skinned merman with verdigris hair.) Modern Greek also uses thálassi, from the word for the sea, θάλασσα, which stands in for the color blue. So maybe Θάλαττα! θάλαττα! Thálatta! Thálatta! also stood for the color blue and homecoming in Homeric Greek.
 
Then the Tech Insider (aka Business Insider) video goes on to claim that we—none of humanity—couldn't possibly perceive the color blue until modern times. I'm upping my knee-jerk facepalm reaction to flat-out fisticuffs. Someone please tell Tech Insider and Radiolab: It's linguistics, Stoopid! Or maybe semantics. Or a lack, thereof. Or maybe it's a bad case of Linguistic relativity gone awry. But not the ancient world's inability to perceive or comprehend blueness. 

So, fast-forward: according to Tech Insider, the Middle Ages are now Modern Times? OK.... Oh, look! The first written usage of the word Blue dates back to ca.1300 AD. We have: bleu, blwe, etc., from O.Fr. blo "pale, pallid, wan. (Merriman). I won't go into the 98 synonyms for blue, in English alone. But I've compiled a list of some pre-industrial kinds of blue:

sky blue, midnight blue, azure, ultramarine, aquamarine, cobalt blue, bice blue, indigo, woad, sapphire, zaffre, lazurite, ice-blue, slate blue, turquoise, beryl, duck's egg blue, robin's egg blue, peacock blue, smoke blue, cornflower, gentian, hyacinth, periwinkle, madder blue, blueberry, teal, turquoise, cerulean, mazarine, livid (as in black & blue) or dead blue, aka mortuary blue... Pompeii blue, Persian blue, Aegean blue...

Who doesn't know Something borrowed, something blue, folkloric devices used to baffle the evil eye. equated with ancient wedding customs—when it was first notated in 1871. "Belief in the evil eye dates back to Classical antiquity. It is referenced by Plato, Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch, Pliny the Elder. In the Aegean,  people with green eyes, and especially blue eyes, are thought to bestow the curse. Thus, in Greece and Turkey amulets against the evil eye take the form of blue eyes." (Wiki) Apotropaic charms (nazars), dating from the 6th c. BC, are still used in the Mediterranean, the Levant, Egypt, and Morocco, the Middle East, and Afghanistan, to repel the evil eye. Blue eyes are still painted on the prows of Mediterranean boats. And even on the tails of airplanes.

A  tree armed with nazars in Turkey. Maybe they should've used goats.—Wiki

The quest for a stable true blue pigment has been a going concern ever since pre-antiquity, and has been documented since the foundation of Christianity to the 19th century, when aniline dyes were invented, because, you know, the Virgin Mary always wore blue. Always. Byzantine images (ca. 500 AD) of the Virgin Mary depicted her wearing her signature dark blue mantle (usually made of precious lapis lazuli stone, or pigment.)

Keeping the Virgin's mantle blue, or the blue sky—blue—in a fresco or a painting, has been a going technical concern for artists—since like, forever. Apparently it's not easy being blue. Most minerals make unstable, or fugitive pigments. Azurite (copper carbonate) aka mountain blue or Armenian stone, azurro della Magna, blue bice or blue verditer, was commonly used since antiquity. It was the chief source of blue during the Middle Age, but it has a nasty habit of turning green.  

Leonardo da Vinci complained mightily to the Almighty about having to use azurite (but it was waaay cheaper). Hans Holbein the Younger painted a field azurite for a blue sky which is slowly turning teal. Teal, I tell you. The mantle of the Madonna in Raphael's Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints has been turning green over the ages because the azurite is weathering into malachite. 

Oil turns azurite green. Bright light, heat, and exposure to air will reduce the intensity of azurite, which can also go completely rogue and turn into black copper oxide. Treatises were written on how to stabilize azurite—or why paintings are varnished. My favorite blue cure—rub garlic on the sky before varnishing it to keep it blue. Would work well for chest colds too. I wonder if the painters were a little peckish.

Michelangelo couldn’t afford ultramarine, and refused to finish his painting The Entombment, because he couldn't get his hands on the prized pigment for love or money. Readily available azurite just wouldn't do. Vermeer mired his family in debt in his quest for the ultimate blue. Lapis lazuli, which literally means somewhere from beyond the sea, which was more valuable than gold. 

Azurite was often substituted for ultramarine blue, because "...the lone source of ultramarine was an arid strip of mountains in northern Afghanistan. ...the color was traditionally restricted to the raiment of Christ or the Virgin Mary." —True Blue, Paris Review.

Blue remains a muse precisely because it is a mirage. “Among the ancient elements,” writes William Gass in his treatise On Being Blue, “blue occurs everywhere: in ice and water, in the flame as purely as in the flower, overheard and inside caves, covering fruit and oozing out of clay.”...Eastern spiritualists have long associated deep blue gemstones, such as lapis lazuli, with the sixth chakra, or third eye, the seat of elevated consciousness in the human body. The Egyptian Book of the Dead recognizes lapis lazuli, carved in the shape of an eye and set in gold, as an amulet of inestimable power. Cleopatra, in common lore, wore powdered lapis lazuli as eye shadow.—True Blue, Paris Review.

Cobalt blue, used to make imitation lapis lazuli, wasn't cheap either. Cobalt ores were mined in Azerbaijan, Baluchistan, and Rajputana, India, but "Persia was the chief source of cobalt ores in the ancient world until the late Middle Ages; although there are also minor cobalt deposits in the western desert of Egypt south of Cairo." (Cobalt) 

In the early Middle Ages, cobalt oxide was used to color the stained glass windows of cathedrals. Cobalt is unique in that it is stable under both low and high heat conditions. Underglaze blue and white porcelain was made in the 8th c. T'ang dynasty; the Ming Dynasty (1400s) was famous for its cobalt underglaze ceramics—precursor to our Blue Willow pattern.

Blue faience hippopotamus, Middle Kingdom (2033-1710 BC)—Wiki

Clearly the ancients had a sense of color, and a real fondness for blue. The Sumerians used rare lapis lazuli on artifacts long before the Egyptians who first developed blue faience (they used copper oxide, not cobalt to color the sintered quartz). Egyptian faience was widely exported to Europe—as far away as Scotland. What was the Picts' favorite color? Blue woad, of course.

Egyptian blue or hsbd-iryt (calcium copper silicate), which means fake lapis lazuli, was the first synthesized pigment (1350 BC) was known to the Romans as caeruleum. The word, derived from cael(um, “sky, heaven” is embedded in the name. Clearly Romans and Egyptians knew what blue was. It was popular until the 4th c. AD. 

Another color, the wadjet eye was blue, blue-green, or sometimes the green of the Nile in summer. To suggest that the ancients couldn't perceive blue, (because we assume that they had no name for those colors? or they called it green because they couldn't see the difference?) is preposterously shallow end of the wading pool thinking. They knew what blue was. And they knew how precious it was. The color of the heavens.

Greek and Roman temples and marble statues were painted in gaudy colors, including azurite-based blue. (See the blue-maned lion of Loutraki 550 BC). Ancient Classical mosaic tile murals used blue for sky and water, etc., not for trees. I won't mention Maya blue here because I'm sticking to Old World examples of blue.
 

Ladies in Blue, Palace of Knossos, (Heraklion, Crete) —Wiki

The Minoans, who predated the Greeks, were excessively fond of blue. (The Aegean Bronze Age murals, the bull leaping frescoes. the dolphin, or flying fish frescoes, or the Ladies in Blue—lots and lots of blue was used.) Blue fresco colors could shift, but not vitrified blue-glazed pots. Or mosaic tiles. Copper oxide, iron, or cobalt oxide was used. Cobalt glass (smalt) was ground up and used as pigment. Clever use of color stabilization.

Ancient glassware of the Levant was often colored blue. We're not talking of the natural green hue of iron in glass, but real cobalt blue. Ancient Greek κυανός, transliterated as kýanos, means "dark blue". What color is dominant in Greek villages? Green lintels and doorjambs? Nope. Blue, bleu, blau by any other name.

The ancient Greek word kyanos, κύανος  means dark blue. Another Greek word for blue is sappheiros, blue stone—which probably meant lapis lazul as the modern word for sapphire is hyakinthos; from the Sanskrit śanipriya, beloved of the planet Saturn (which is bluish in the sky.) The ancient Greeks also used a specific word for pale blue, γλαυκός ‎glaukós, “blue-green, blue-grey” which also appears in Homer. ( Proto-Indo-European *gleh₂w-ko.) 

True, there were fluid boundaries between blueness to greeness or even yellowness in many cultures—including Navajo, and Chinese 青 (qīng). But that fluidity is true of many colors. And bruises too. It really came down to context. No one thought the grass and sky were one color. Or that they couldn’t see the difference. That’s myopic thinking on our part.

What evidence is there that blue was a predominant color? Well, let's see, the entire foundation of the Bronze Age was built upon the extraction of copper ore—and copper ore yields azurite, "a soft, deep blue copper mineral produced by weathering of copper ore deposits." They went through many workarounds to stabilize that blue in faience, glass, and pigment.

Fresh mined azurite crystals from Špania Dolina, Slovakia —Wiki

Of course people could see that color wedged between green and violet. Blue is an integral part of the color spectrum. Rainbows never lie. Sure, Xenophanes described the rainbow with only three bands of color: porphyra (Tyrean purple*), khlōrós (light green), and erythrós (ruddy red). But the Greeks also believed the entire universe was composed of three elements: Air, Earth, Water (Fire was a reaction). Purple and red were considered the most costly of royal colors. Besides, it sounds like Xenophanes was describing the interference pattern of a supernumerary rainbow (pink, purple and blue-green hues).

We tend to conventionally acknowledge seven colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet (ROYGBIV), because Sir Isaac Newton in his prism treatise, Opticks (1704), said so. But the lensmaker was also a bit blind, and originally named only five colors of the visible spectrum. "The originall or primary colours are Red, yellow, Green, Blew, & a violet purple; together with Orang, Indico, & an indefinite varietie of intermediate gradations." (Now the word Orange is a fairly new concept dating from the 16th c. Sometimes colors didn’t have their own names. People could see orange, but described it as yellow-red or even cadmium.)

Goethe's symbolic colorwheel (1809) —Wiki

Bowing to the ancient Greek sophists, Newton later threw in orange and indigo so it would be analogous to the number of notes in a musical scale (which in turn bowed to the Sumerian love of seven.) Plato was pretty keen on the idea of math and music defining the "harmonies of the cosmos." Natural philosophers were not afraid to shoehorn science into popular thought processes.

German poet and artist Goethe wrote a psychological study on the nature, function, and psychology of color in his 1810 treatise, Theory of Colours. "Blue still brings a principle of darkness with it. This colour has a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye.... As the upper sky and distant mountains appear blue, so a blue surface seems to retire from us. ...light and its absence, are necessary to the production of colour.... Colour itself is a degree of darkness.") (Maria Popova, Atlantic Monthly)

Cyanometer Horace-Bénédict de Saussure 1760 Wiki

Then there's the pursuit of royal blue, and later, royal purple in the cloth dying industry. In Mesopotamia, a 7th c. BC cuneiform tablet preserves an indigo recipe for dyeing lapis-colored wool (uqnatu). The Greeks imported ινδικόν indikón, indigo dye from India. The Romans Latinized the term to indicum. Indigo was in high demand across the ancient world. (During the Edo period, silk was forbidden, so the Japanese dyed cotton with indigo.) In North Africa, to this day, cloth dyed with indigo signifies wealth.

Byzantine Emperor Justinian I in Tyrian purple, 6th-c mosaic Italy

The Phoenicians of Tyre made an indigo dye from a species of marine snail, but Tyrian purple dye from murex shells was a rare commodity. Phoenicia, from the Greek, phoinós means the land of purple, or, dark red. Tyrian purple was also called Tyrian red. The ancient idea of purple was more of a violet-maroon color. They sometimes over-dyed indigo with purple. There are records of the dye in Ugarit and Hittite texts ca. 14th c. BC, but the Minoans may have invented the process of making Imperial purple ca. 20th–18th c. BC, centuries before the Tyrians (ca. 1570 BC).

Then the silly BBC-sponsored video claims there was no word for blue in Hebrew. Really? A slow news day at the office? What color is the tzitzit on the tallit /prayer shawl again? According to a biblical commandment (15:38), a blue thread—tekhelet (תְּכֵלֶת) must be included in the tzitzit (תכלת), and that blue (or blue-violet) is the same color mentioned 49 times in the Torah. A sea snail, Hexaplex trunculus, produces a blue which could be tekhelet. (But it was excluded from this video as a synonym for blue because it can also represent purple or black.)

Modern Irish Color chart. Go raibh maith agat for translating Google image @Tuigim

In Irish, one of the oldest Indo-European languages, gorm is the word used for the color of the sea, and for blue eyes. (Proto-Celtic *gurmos.) Sometimes glas (green) was also used for blue. Or glastum the color of blue dye extracted from dyer's woad (cabbage family—they also used whortleberries for blue dyes). Glas may refer to grey-blue eyes, or green grass, but not bright dyed green, uaine (uaithne). They combined words for more blue shades: gormghlas for azure, gormuaine for blue-green. They also distinguished between gorm and glas and uaine. (Líath means grey or light blue.) Why? Because there are words for blue.

 Post: Edit

Scots Gaelic comes from the Irish, note the similarities.

What color was Krishna again? Oh yeah, blue. Blue symbolizes divinity in many, if not most cultures.

Krishna, from Sanskrit Kṛṣṇa, dark or dark blue, has jambul-colored skin.—Wiki

You can see things without specifically naming them. Aren't we really flogging another version that horse, can one think without words? "Steven Pinker notes that we are not born with language, so that it is not likely that we are engineered to think in words alone." But that's another argument.
 
Yes, Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote extensively about how color patterns were connoted in ancient texts. Light/dark, red/yellow; green, purple. Then blue. But if we look at the light/dark idea, colors tended to be divided along that system, vs. names. Blue can be either light or dark. Maybe instead of looking for ancient words to represent blue, we need to look at synonyms for darkness and light.

The silly video asks: Can you see a color if you don't have a word for it? Apparently certain animals can see blue. Satin bowerbirds and chimps can see blue—even owls and pigeons can see blue. So the ability to see blue predates speciation and also necessarily predates language. The human eye can detect a million colors, (and many women, who have four types of cone cells, tetrachromats, can see even more colors), but the ancients couldn't perceive the color blue in days of yore? Hmmmf. Not buying it.

Then the video claims that blue is exceedingly rare in nature. What?

There are wild blue anemones, agapanthus/lily of the Nile, asters, baby blue eyes, bellflowers, bluebells, blue camas, blue-eyed-grass, bugloss, clematis, columbine, blueberries, borage, brodiaea, ceanothus, chicory, cornflowers, campanula, crocus, delphiniums, false indigo,  flax, forget-me-nots, gentian, gilia, hydrangea, houndstongue, hyacinths, irises, indigo, Ithuriel’s spears, larkspur, lilac, lobelia, lungwort, lupine, morning glory, monkshood, nigella, nightshade, periwinkle, phacelia, blue poppies, rosemary, sage, scilla, veronica, violets. And then the birds: bluejays, bluebirds, cerulean warblers, blue buntings, indigo buntings, lazuli buntings, azure tits, blue tits, kingfishers, macaws, quetzalbirds… all the oceans, lakes, oh yeah, and the sky are blue. Rainbows too.

Jules Davidoff's logic, such as it is, is either seriously flawed or it's misinterpreted. His study was based on one primitive African tribe who were probably freaking out just by looking at a computer monitor... Cathodes emit a mixture of three color frequencies and trick the eye into assuming other color exists via interpolation. Had the Namibian tribe been showed something borrowed, something blue from their native environment like a Where's Waldo experiment, instead of using a pinwheel on a phosphor screen, then the study might hold some merit. Of course he would need to be fluent in their language and their culture. Not an outsider looking in.

As it turns out "This striking "experiment" was a BBC dramatization, and the description of its "results" was invented by the authors of the documentary, and not proposed or endorsed by the scientists involved." In other words, bad popular science strikes again. Can you spell FAKE PSEUDOSCIENCE?

Some of this stinking thinking dates back to 1858 when politician (4 x Prime Minister) who championed Irish Home Rule, and Classics scholar, William Gladstone (1809 - 1898) conducted a survey of ancient written languages and noted that the speakers did not name colors precisely or consistently as modern English speakers. In other words, they didn't use the names of colors as abstract nouns. He erroneously concluded that because there was no consistent word for blue in Greek, " ... that the organ of color and its impressions were but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age." And apparently we've been parroting that idea ever since.
 
Winding back to Goethe's emotional equivalences, here's another take on the wine-dark sea:

Homer describes the sea as wine-dark following a tragedy. Odysseus mourns the death of his men after a shipwreck, when they’ve been swallowed up by the wine-dark sea. Achilles mourns the death of Patroclus looking out on the wine-dark sea. 'The idea is that the sea is dangerous, it's captivating, it's intoxicating, just like wine', he says. 'It's much more than just the colour, it's more about what the object-metaphor is encouraging us to think about'. Amanda Smith—Were the ancient Greeks and Romans colour blind?

About that wine-dark sea—let me reiterate, that's a modern translation, Andrew Lang and Robert Fitzgerald's poetic license. Homer actually wrote: the wine-facing sea. He may have been depicting the sea at sunset, or even a toxic red tide algal bloom—always cause for alarm.

In The Sea Around Us science writer Rachel Carson wrote:

The sea is blue because the sunlight is reflected back to our eyes from the water molecules or from very minute particles suspended in the sea. In the journey of the light rays into deep water all the red rays and most of the yellow rays of the spectrum have been absorbed, so when the light returns to our eyes it is chiefly the cool blue rays that we see. Where the water is rich in plankton, it loses the glassy transparency that permits this deep penetration of the light rays. The yellow and brown and green hues of the coastal waters are derived from the minute algae and other microorganisms so abundant there. Seasonal abundance of certain forms containing reddish or brown pigments may cause the “red water” known from ancient times in many parts of the world, and so common is this condition in some enclosed seas that they owe their names to it — the Red Sea and the Vermilion Sea are examples.

What makes this presentist theory, or modern speculation that the Classical world had defective color vision all rather funny is that before Newton's Opticks was published in 1704, even European poetry was a bit bland on the naming of colors. That's why French Surrealist poet, Arthur Rimbaud's 1884 breakthrough poem celebrating colors, Voyelles was such a big hit—it took poetry into the visionary realm of artists.

Blue O, great Trumpet blaring strange and piercing cries
Through Silences where Worlds and Angels pass crosswise;
Omega, O, the violet brilliance of Those Eyes! —Voyelles

Also, our relationship to the naming of color in literature has changed radically since the 18th c. (coupled with the revolutionary discovery of aniline dyes in 1856 which, for the first time produced a wide range of bright, stable colors—the first color? Purple!).

(An aside: The Greeks were astonished that their clients, the neighboring Celts drank their imported Greek wine neat, (and were thusly barbaric), as civilized people always diluted their wine with water.  I've seen Mary Bianchi’s watered down homemade Italian wine turn purple, then blue. Try it sometime with Mogen David wine too. The blueness of the wine might have something to do with the pH of spring water. Oh, and BTW, those green traffic lights are actually azure blue. We just call them green.)

Lapis lazuli, lazulum, stone from heaven's skies. —Wiki

All this talk of blue and I am reminded of Robert Francis's poems: 

BLUE CORNUCOPIA

Pick any blue sky blue   cerulean   azure
cornflower   periwinkle   blue-eyed grass
blue bowl   bluebell   pick lapis lazuli
blue pool   blue girl   blue Chinese vase
or pink-blue chicory alias ragged sailor
or sapphire   bluebottle fly   indigo bunting
blue dragonfly or devil's darning needle
blue-green   turquoise   peacock   blue spruce
blue verging on violet    the fringed gentian
gray-blue   blue bonfire smoke   autumnal
haze   blue hill   blueberry   distance
and darker blue   storm-blue   blue goose
ink   ocean   ultramarine   pick winter
blue snow-shadows   ice   the blue star Vega.

and his

BLUE WATER

Winter uses all the blues there are.
One shade of blue for water, one for ice,
Another blue for shadows over snow.
The clear or cloudy sky uses blue twice-
Both different blues. And hills row after row
Are colored blue according to how far.
You know the bluejay's double-blur device
Shows best when there are no green leaves to show.
And Sirius is a winterbluegreen star.
 
Robert Francis

The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural... The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white. 

~Wassily Kandinsky

Landscapes (tempera, art)

February 29, 2008  art is from 2006 to 2007.

In each class, I begin this lesson with large gesture painting so kids won't freak over details. I  deconstruct several large calendar photos on the board to show the basic shapes. (KISS: keep it simple, sweetie). I laminate 2 photos back-to-back and let kids choose an image.

We air draw the shapes first before we begin painting. I don't let kids sketch with pencil because they get too caught up in it and forget to paint. And we only have about 40 minutes to paint and clean up! So making big gestures with the arm translates well.



These are, for the most part, quick 2-5 minute sketches of landscapes with tempera to demonstrate how the landscape is comprised of basic shapes (layers). Note the photo is a model. We work from calendar photos. Tempera on 80 lb white sulfite paper, 12x18" each.



We look for basic shapes to emulate. I demonstrate water and sky with wet on wet technique. Though we're using tempera, or poster paint, it can be thinned down and used like watercolor. I paint paper with water first and add color sparingly. Their palette contains only four colors: yellow, magenta (no red), cyan/sky blue and dark blue. And from that, they make all the colors of the world. Brown is made from all three primary colors. As is black.

I don't give kids little brushes. We do these paintings with fat 1" wide brushes! Harder to get details that way. We go for the basic shapes. The rest will follow.

Since I rarely have more than 10 sessions per class (sometimes I only see kids 5 times in any given year), I streamline and accelerate lesson plans to cover maximum ground. So this lesson focuses on primary color mixing and identifying simple shapes.



These sketches introduce the idea of water horizon line. Sometimes the easiest way to begin a painting is to put a horizontal stripe down the middle. I usually start with yellow and add layers of color. There are four colors in their palettes (really ice cube trays) Yellow, magenta (no red), cyan/sky blue and dark blue. Nada mas! And from that, they make all the colors. Brown is made from all three primary colors. I tried using stabillo pencil to sketch in black...I will do anything to NOT put black in the painting tray/palette (really an ice cube tray).



This is an unfinished sketch of Maui. A child was having trouble seeing the basic shapes so I did a quickie demo. I've given up on letting them sketch first with a pencil (though I did on this one to show him the shapes), because they'll spend the entire hour drawing and not painting. We usually have only an hour total to complete our work, not much time to crank out art!




I'm noticing that the longer I work with a particular group of kids, the more in depth and realistic my demos become. I worked with these kids in 3rd and 5th grade and so I was able to refine the info.






With an advanced class, I introduced the multi-color dabbing technique for shrubbery with sparing use of black and white. I also tried to introduce light direction as well, with less success. (added 3/17)

Tempera fish (in class demo) (art)

Tempera, watercolor, and water-base black marking pen (Eberhart Faber), 12x18". Slideshow of outrageous fish, a little fish anatomy and then kids invent their own fantastical fishes. Introduction of white is always interesting as kids want to go overboard. We put color down first‚ otherwise they try & paint white on white, missing the point of making pastels, hues and tones.

Nicasio Reservoir drawing & watercolor for Art from the Heart (art)

Nicasio Reservoir, 8x11", colored pencil & pastel

Nicasio Reservoir, 8x11", practice piece, watercolor

wax resist watercolor fish (art)

wax resist watercolor fish, in class demos.

Purple Heart DOA Valentine, and Paper Angel collages for Sonoma State Art from the Heart Art Auction

Paper Angels

Purple Heart DOA

Aquarelle watercolor sticks, morillaboad, collage, 8x10, 1991

Lima Journal, a rough timeline (3 watercolors)

Not sure of the dates, I’m also missing one Ecuador journal but inside my watercolor block I found three watercolor sketches, one of Ecuador, two unfinished sketches of Puerto Ayora.

Timeline: 

7/3 Equator

When? Galapagos

7/12 Española Island

7/13 Floreana, PO Bay

7/17? Bartolomé 

7/19 

7/25 Ecuador to Lima

7/27 Cuzco

8/8 to 11 Machu Picchu

8/19 Arequipa, Puno

8/22 Paracas

8/29 SFO

We explore the countryside. We visit the Otavalo market to buy Panama hats. Otovaleños still speak Quechua, a hangover from the Inca conquest days but their original language is lost.

No date:

7/26. No dates in my journal…. At the airport we hold a copy of our chapbook of poetry Falling to Sea Level in hopes that the Peruvian poet Carlos Arellano has come to meet us. We’ve been told that Peru is positively dangerous for rip-offs. And we guard each other’s flank diligently.

The exchange rate about 80 intis to the dollar and so we convert money, it’s a much better rate on the black market but we need the intis now. I can’t begin to describe Peru without comparing it to Ecuador. I’ve spent a lot of time in Mexico, in Baja California, Guatemala. Mexico City helps prepare for the shock but it’s far worse than that. Any port in a storm just won’t do here. There are limits. 

The city is so dismal. I thought Jesus was a being quaint when he locked us into the car as we left the airport but he was protecting us from the city. He couldn’t protect us from the view. People picking their way through piles of refuge refuge. Mongrels guarding claimed treasure. Cardboard and tin shanties and other building material. 

Where one enters a Third World country one can expect to see buildings in a continual state of growth and repair. When one level is finished, the cement, the bricks, and the mortar are used to add a second or third story onto an insubstantial first story structure. So the skyline is a series of ragged walls and tall spears of rebar. 

Chickens adapt to rooftop living, clothes hang out a long time to dry— difficult in a place where the fog comes in for six months of the year. Small fires along the street, people warming themselves. Numerous street vendors and stalls. On one street the vendors have claimed it in its entirety, so it’s difficult to navigate. It is a street of oranges and shoes and gum and motor oil. 

The only time it rains here is when El Niño, the warm, current comes, changing the weather pattern and the normally cold Humboldt current turns warm. When this happens thousands of fish starve and die. The Antarctic current is one reason why it’s so cold and foggy here. Both it and the Humboldt currents feed La Garúa, the ever present mist.

Our room is $12 a night, pricy after Ecuador, where a bed goes for a dollar a night. Even food is expensive. Meals cost $1 to 2  here. The cost of living is about twice as high as Ecuador, with far fewer services. Our Hotel Colón was $5 a night.