COLOR IN THE MID-DAY SUN

### We had fun looking at the way Frederic Remington saw vivid colors in the dark of night.

Here, on the other hand, is a different illustrator who looked at a bright mid-day scene and painted a study in gray:









An artist who feels the call to explore color will not be deterred by a dark night or a lack of electricity, just as an artist with access to all sorts of light may choose to disregard its potential for color and narrow his or her focus to black and white. Great artists often work from wherever fate placed them, without waiting for the perfect lighting or the right conditions:

Look under foot....The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world.
--John Burroughs

By the way-- those elegant studies in gray are details from the often ignored center of one of the most famous Norman Rockwell paintings.

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COLORS IN THE WESTERN MOONLIGHT

### Cowboy illustrator Frederic Remington seemed to find a whole rainbow of luminous colors in the night.









When other painters might reach for a dark blue, Remington reaches for greens and purples and violets.

Did Remington actually see these colors in nature? Even Cezanne, the grandaddy of abstract art, recognized that "painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations."

To understand more about Remington's "sensations," look at his pictures contrasting the light from the immense night sky with the tiny, fragile light of humans.

It must have been easy to feel insignificant and defenseless camping out all alone under the huge western sky.

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