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Sunshine 2020: Prompt Two
Jul. 6th, 2020 01:57 pm
Prompt 2: Orange
Orange is a warm color that is associated with a variety of things including: excitement, vitality, invincibility, speed, vigilance, dedication, loyalty, family, success, friendship, power, change, harvest, and warmth.
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Orange can be the warm sunrise after after the darkest night. It can be the bountiful harvest at the end of your hard work. When was a time where dedication and vigilance have reaped their rewards? What future harvests excite you?
Please feel free to answer in whichever way comes naturally to you, be it a memory you share or an artwork you create. If you’d like a more specific idea to kick things off: paint or share a picture that evokes the theme of orange.
I tell Tally the theme, mostly because I'm thinking out loud and she just looks up and says well at least I can't link that to Medieval history. I wasn't GOING to write another history-related post but... really, that's a challenge, isn't it? And I don't back down from one of those!
You can all blame Tally for this
Elizabethan Sumptuary laws dictated what colour and type of clothing (including furs, fabrics, and trims) were allowed for people of various ranks or incomes. In the case of clothing, it was partially intended to ensure that people did not dress 'above their station'. Orange was normally worn by those in lower social rankings because it was very cheap and easy to access.
What I was going to talk about was Van Gogh although I realise that also makes me pretty nerdy. I am, but that's not the point! Van Gogh has been one of my favourite painters - probably my absolute favourite actually - ever since I first saw Starry Night. I fell in love with the swirling and the colours.
Orange was an important colour for post-impressionists, and no other painter used orange so often and dramatically as Vincent van Gogh. For Van Gogh orange and yellow represented the sunlight in Provence. He created his own oranges with mixtures of yellow, ochre and red, and placed them next to slashes of sienna red and bottle green, and below a sky of turbulent blue and violet. He put an orange moon and stars in a cobalt blue sky. He wrote to his brother Theo of "searching for oppositions of blue with orange, of red with green, of yellow with violet, searching for broken colours and neutral colours to harmonize the brutality of extremes, trying to make the colours intense, and not a harmony of greys."
You only have to look at ( Willow Trees at Sunset ) or ( Still Life with Basket and Six Oranges ) to see how vibrant the oranges he used were!
