Saturday, July 17, 2010

Dancing in the Western Sky


She dances in the western sky at sunset like a radiant female in a Maxfield Parrish painting.

The summer sky is painted from here to there in shades of lavender; and the floating summer haze is like a diaphanous veil. The slender crescent of moon glows like a lantern, and a single star hovers high above everything. The drifting clouds are intense rose and purple, and all is framed by a frieze of smoky dreaming trees.

Parrish was a painter like no other, and he "did" dawn and evening skies like nobody else. His use of color was dazzlingly luminous, particularly his golds, cobalts, mauves and purples, and he achieved what is often called an elegiac vivacity through a complicated technique in which layers of oil color were applied alternately with layers of varnish. An ethereal magical otherworldly quality informs everything he ever painted.

There is no mansion, barn or gently flowing stream here, but I would like to think that my photo is reminiscent in its own small way of Maxfield Parrish's lovely "New Moon".

3 comments:

Tabor said...

Parrish is one of my favorites. His work is so hedonistic.

kerrdelune said...

Tabor, nobody painted skies the way Parrish did - they were so richly colored, and definitely hedonistic.

the wild magnolia said...

A very moving photograph. It gives me chill bumps.

I'll be checking out Parrish.

Thanks for sharing! Good job!