Only God can make a tree

Genesis 1:11-12
Hosea 14:8

Now, there’s several different ways of making evergreens.
See? Just back and forth.
Back and forth, back and forth.
And you can just keep going on and on and on and on,
make as many branches on this tree as you want.
(Everybody knows, there’s five hundred branches on a evergreen tree,
So don’t put too many in there,
don’t overkill. . . .)
Back and forth, back and forth.
Leave some limbs out there;
you need places for the little birds to sit.
Little birds gotta have a place to put their foots.



From Bob Ross: Painting An Evergreen Tree, YouTube, 14 September 2009. Submitted by Daniel Galef.

The Nightingale

The color paintings were prepared on fine,
brilliant Wu silk, which were closely and wonderfully woven.

Traditional Chinese paints were used. The blues
and greens came from azurite, malachite, and indigo;

the reds from cinnabar, realgar, and orpiment, with the brilliant red
from coral and the pink-red from a flowering vine; umber from an iron oxide

called limonite; yellow from the sap of the rattan plant; and white from lead
or pulverized oyster shells. To all, powdered jade was added

for good fortune. These colors were mixed with stag horn, fish or ox
glue, or glue made from the pulp of the soap bean. The black

Chinese ink is ten parts pine soot, three parts powdered jade,
and one part glue made from donkey hides boiled

in Tang River water. The paints were mixed with boiling water. In
the first stage, the water looked like fish eyes; in the second,

like innumerable pearls strung together; and in the final stage,
like rolling breakers. The paints were applied with Chinese brushes made

of sheep, rabbit, goat, weasel, and wolf hairs picked in autumn,
as well as of mouse whiskers, with handles of bamboo and buffalo horn.

Where changes were required in the art, the paint was removed
by wiping the area with the juice of the apricot seed.



Illustration notes from The Nightingale by Demi (Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1985). Submitted by J.R. Solonche.

Post-Painterly Abstraction

for Helen Frankenthaler

She departed from the romantic search
for the sublime to pursue her own path,
pouring turpentine-thinned paint
in watery washes onto raw canvas
so that it soaked into the fabric weave
becoming one with it.

Her method emphasized flat surface
over illusory depth and the nature of paint,
releasing color from the gestural approach
and romantic rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism,
landscapes looking to many like a large paint rag
casually accidental and incomplete.



From the biography of Helen Frankenthaler in the New York Times. Phrases have been picked from the article and put together, in order, instead of one whole excerpt. Submitted by Jenni B. Baker.

The eye of the beholder

Ugly is in the eye of the beholder.

Grey skies,
Grey streets,
Grey grass.

Chimney stacks, factories.
Everywhere a factory.
Belching smoke. Black gates. Brick walls.

A wretched dog.
And the brilliantly
red nose of
the heavy drinker.

The industrial landscape of
1930s Salford wasn't a pretty one.

But one 'clumsy boy' grey up, looked beyond
the bleakness and saw something beautiful.

Grey skies became
A silver canopy
undulating over a sea of red brick.

Factories became cathedrals of industry
with soaring chimney spires.

Crowds of workers became colourful, matchstick people
And black smoke became the
breath of a city alive with hard graft and banter.



A full page advert for an ITV documentary on L S Lowry, spotted in the Observer magazine on the 25th April 2011. Submitted by Marika Rose.

Always

It is always okay
to paint the sky orange
and give cats six legs.



From the blog post What Should a 4 Year Old Know? The first line is one syllable too long for a proper senryu/haiku but close enough. Submitted by Gabriel Smy.