Sunday 5 July 2009

More on natural colour

"This theory of what constitutes fine colour is one of the peculiar traits of the old-time painters, and of the landscape critic who studies nature in the National Gallery...Above all things it must not be natural, or it ceases to be fine and sinks to the level of the commonplace...if one suggests that it has no resemblance to what it claims to represent, they reply, 'Ah, but it is a glorious frame, full of colour!' But colour in painting can only be really fine so far as it is true to nature...Beauty in colour, as in form, depends on its fitness and truth."
T. F. Goodall
quoted by P. H. Emerson in
Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art. 1889

Emerson continues
The vulgar view of fine colour is easily explained on evolutionary grounds, it is but a harking back to the instincts of the frugivorous apes - our ancestors.

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