22 December - Violet d’Egypte
The numinous floating world
"The paintings from 1947-48 were, in fact, ambiguous, showing Rothko feeling his way toward an expression that would directly, without the interference of specific shape, suggest the numinous floating world into which he stepped once his obstacles were left behind. He scraped and thinned his colours. Their edges bled. A form with most tenuous of edges could slide into another, while atmosphere from one moment to the next could be weighted or lightened.” About Rothko, Dore Ashton, p105
19 December - Chinese orange & saffron
Colours like bombs
Maurice Denis’s remark about the Fauves’ « anarchy”
was not unjustified. Derain placed his colours like bombs. “Our colours
were turning into sticks of dynamite,” he said later to George Duthuit.
“They were primed to discharge light.”
Matisse,
Schneider p215
13 December - Silver
Colour chords and orchestration
“The different shades of colour combine like musical
chords into a harmonic whole, in which the mood communicated by the colours
is analogous to that of major and minor keys.The
rich orchestration of the colour tones appears as a unified whole, even
though the eye can still detect individual melodic phrases and differentiated
structural rhythms.”
Paul Klee Painting Music, Hajo Düchting, p 57
30 November - White
Mystery
Louise Bourgeois describes one of her untitled drawings of the 1960’s: “I think mystery is more interesting than explanation, so let’s leave this a mystery.”
Louise
Bourgeois, Drawings and Observations, p123
21 December - Yellow
Nervous Collisions