Sensational Color Pro Kate Smith's Online Color Journal » artist

Colorful Expressions of Joy

Kate Smith — Sat, 16 May 2009 15:23:24 +0000

BMW gave awesome artist Robin Rhode total creative freedom, paint, a huge canvas and the ultimate driving machine.

Margaret Mellis: A Life in Colour

Kate Smith — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:27:58 +0000

Margaret Mellis, artist, was born on January 22, 1914. She died on March 17, 2009, aged 95. She was one of the last surviving artists from the St. Ives Group of the 1930s.

Colour was her true element and she developed a strong constructivist flavor, seen in the often severely geometric collages and wooden assemblages. Mellis shared my love of aged and layered paint — peeling, changing, revealing– and her pieces assembled from weathered wood draw me in.

From an article about the life of Ms. Mellis that appeared in The Times the following paragraph captures what I appreciate about this artist that seemed to be both for her time and ahead of her time in her response to the world around her.

The driftwood constructions belie the sophistication and technical skill imbued in this body of work. Transforming the debris of human activity into objects permeated with an elemental energy, a profound expression in which humour, pathos and the poetic all play their part. This was Mellis’s response to the world in which she lived for nearly a century.

The piece below is from Austin Desmond Fine Arts where you can see many of her pieces.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here is a glimpse of the artist in a clip from a documentary titled “A Life in Colour”

If you are not familiar with this artist many newspapers have published tributes that share her life in a snapshot:

The Times which included the lovely photograph of the artist shown above.

The UK Telegraph

The Independent

Color Quote of the Day: November 30th

Kate Smith — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 23:00:00 +0000

“Never has a pigment been better named than ultramarine blue. Fashionable, even today, in its nomenclature! It is ultra in every way.”

Karen Fitzgerald
American Artist

Color Quote of the Day: November 29th

Kate Smith — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 23:05:37 +0000

“What, you haven’t any ivory-black on your palette? If you think you are going to make black with blue and red, I can’t have you in my class. You might stir up trouble with such ideas.”

Fernand Cormon
French Painter (December 24, 1845 – March 20, 1924)

Color Quote of the Day: November 28th

Kate Smith — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 23:05:52 +0000

“I can paint you the skin of Venus with mud, provided you let me surround it as I will.”

Eugene Delacroix
French Romantic Artist (26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863)

Color Quote of the Day: November 27th

Kate Smith — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 23:05:20 +0000

“Colour should be used to depict the three major emotions in a man’s life – anticipation, realization and retrospection.”

Ernest Lawson
Canadian-born American Impressionist Painter, 1873-1939

Color Quote of the Day: November 26th

Kate Smith — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 23:05:36 +0000

“The mind is excited by what painters refer to as ‘broken color’, the juxtaposition of two or more colors in a single passage.”

Eric Wiegardt, AWS NWS
American Watercolor Artist

Color Quote of the Day: November 25th

Kate Smith — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 23:05:58 +0000

“The artist, busy and unsettled, can find a moment’s peace – and even whole-being rejuvenation – by quietly attuning to a red sky, a gray sky, a black sky, a blue sky.”

Eric Maisel
San Francisco-based Creativity Coach for Writers, Actors, Visual Artists, and Musicians

Color Quote of the Day: November 22nd

Kate Smith — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 23:05:02 +0000

“I was walking along a road one evening – on one side lay the city, and below me was the fjord. The sun went down – the clouds were stained red, as if with blood. I felt as though the whole of nature was screaming – it seemed as though I could hear a scream. I painted that picture, painting the clouds like real blood. The colours screamed.”

Edvard Munch

Color Quote of the Day: November 20th

Kate Smith — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:05:18 +0000

“If you look closely at any face, you’ll start to see that different areas of the flesh tones are tinged with four other colors – red, green, purple and yellow.”

Doug Dawson
Artist