How do you see this tree?

Is it really green? Use green, then, the most beautiful green on your palette. And that shadow, rather blue? Don’t be afraid to paint it as blue as possible...

This is my new painting, hope you like it

How do you see this tree?

9” x 12”

Acrylic on canvas

By Marilou Rivera-Ramos

Te dicen que un árbol es sólo una combinación de elementos químicos. Prefiero creer que Dios lo creó, y que es habitado por una ninfa.

Auguste Renoir

Pintor francés, considerado el representante del Impresionismo más sensual y poseedor de un estilo resplandeciente e íntimo, particularmente las representaciones de desnudos femeninos.

The Impressionists

The Impressionist study color exclusively insofar as the decorative effect, but without freedom, retaining the shackles of verisimilitude. For them the dream landscape, created from many different entities, does not exist. They look and perceive harmoniously, but without any aim. Their edifice rest upon no solid base which is founded upon the nature of the sensation perceived by means of color.

They heed only the eye and neglect the mysterious centers of thought, so falling into merely scientific reasoning... They are the officials of tomorrow, as bad as the officials of yesterday... The art of yesterday has plumbed the depths, it has produced masterpieces and will continue to do so. Meanwhile, the officials of today are aboard a boat that is vacillating, badly constructed and incomplete... When they speak of their art, what is it? A purely superficial art, full of affectations and purely material. The is no thought there.

... “But you have a technique?” they will demand.

No I have not. Or rather I do have one, but it is very fugitive, very flexible, according to my disposition when I arise in the morning; a technique which I apply in my own manner to express my own thought without any concern for the truth of the common, exterior aspects of Nature.

From “Diverses Choses, 1896-1897” an unpublished manuscript, part of which appears in Jean de Rotonchamp, Paul Gauguin, 1848-1903 (Paris: Cress, 1925); these selections from pp. 210, 216, 211.

Theories of Modern Art

A source Book by Artists and Critics

Herschel B. Chipp with Contributions by Peter Selz and Joshua C. Taylor

Los árboles tienen una vida secreta que sólo les es dado conocer a los que se trepan a ellos.

Reinaldo Arenas

Poeta, novelista y dramaturgo cubano