orientations in sunlight
Still reading my aunt Effie's Durrell book:
Cerulean sky touched with white cirrus-- such fleece as grows between the horns of nine-day goatlets, or on the cocoons of silkworms; viridian to peacock-tail green where the sea threshes itself out against the cliffs. Prismatic explosion of waves against the blue sky, crushing out their shivering packets of colour, and then the hissing black intake of the water going back. The billiard-green patch edged with violet that splashes the sea below Lindos. The strange nacreous bones of cliff at Castello. But to paint Greece one would have to do more than play with a few colours. Other problems: how to convey the chalky whiteness of the limestone, the chalk-dust that comes off the columns on to one's fingers, the soft pollen-like bloom on the ancient vases which makes so many of them seen like great plums of pure light. And when you had done all this you would still have to master the queer putty-mauve, putty-grey tones of the island rock-- rock that seems to be slowly cooling lava...
(--reflections on a marine venus
Cerulean sky touched with white cirrus-- such fleece as grows between the horns of nine-day goatlets, or on the cocoons of silkworms; viridian to peacock-tail green where the sea threshes itself out against the cliffs. Prismatic explosion of waves against the blue sky, crushing out their shivering packets of colour, and then the hissing black intake of the water going back. The billiard-green patch edged with violet that splashes the sea below Lindos. The strange nacreous bones of cliff at Castello. But to paint Greece one would have to do more than play with a few colours. Other problems: how to convey the chalky whiteness of the limestone, the chalk-dust that comes off the columns on to one's fingers, the soft pollen-like bloom on the ancient vases which makes so many of them seen like great plums of pure light. And when you had done all this you would still have to master the queer putty-mauve, putty-grey tones of the island rock-- rock that seems to be slowly cooling lava...
(--reflections on a marine venus