David Marquis

This another just wonderful picture, the tracks of the carriages and trolleys in the snow, these sort of muddy, a lot of the muddy colors. He is using the color of the canvas as a color, but he is surrounding it in such a way that he is making it look like it’s dirt and slush. That’s back to those same principle that color only exists in relation to its neighbor.

He is making a color from the canvas by what he surrounds that color with. Now in fairness the canvas has probably darkened somewhat over time, it probably was lighter color originally so the contrast is probably not quite so great. So the streets probably didn’t look quite so dirty, but the principle is still there. In that you see all kinds of areas of this painting, if you look at it closely, you see areas where the canvas is showing through and being used by the artist as a color and as an integral part of the composition.

If you look along the borders in the sky and certainly look at the tracks of the trolleys you will see the bare canvas showing through, you will also see it in his building. On the right side you will some of the raw canvas showing through, building is sort of brick. And pay particular attention to how he is making this wonderful brick color by dabs of blue and orange with some vermillion red and he is creating, really he is creating the color of brick, but not by mixing brown and white but by making, combining all these colors knowing how they interact with one another. And when you stand back and look at it, it says ‘brick,’ but when you look at up close, it’s just dabs of color.

And the trees, the same way you look at the tree trunks, they are not just black and white, or brown and white, they are made up of blues and violets and reds, all kinds of colors, but your eye mixes those colors when you stand back. And it creates a very rich color that says ‘tree’ in a way that you can’t do by doing it with just value. Again each artist took those principles of color, simultaneous contrast, warm and cool, bright and dull, and they incorporated them into their painting in a slightly different way depending on their personality and their interest and that’s the wonderful thing about the starting point of Delacroix. They’re using the same principles, but none of their paintings look like Delacroix, and I love that, I love that they are so personal.