Word: colored
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...part, these limits were due to the poverty of Ryder's training as a draftsman of the human figure. Ryder could make dramatic, even magical conjunctions of shape. His color, judging from what is left of it, was rich. But he drew feebly. New York in the early 1870s could not give an art student much more than a remote echo of beaux arts disciplines in that department. The convention is to treat this as Ryder's good luck: it enabled his native, visionary qualities to prosper, unsullied by academic convention...
...could handle -- though not for reasons Turner would have approved. It made fewer demands on particularity. "There was no detail to vex the eye," Ryder wrote of one view of a lone tree in a field near Yarmouth, Mass. And so "I squeezed out big chunks of pure, moist color and taking my palette knife, I laid on blue, green, white and brown in great sweeping strokes . . . I saw that it was good and clean and strong. I saw nature springing into life upon my dead canvas. It was better than nature . . . I raced around the fields like a colt...
...like De Kooning, but actually he looked more like his idol, Corot, only denser and more fixed: tiny imploded scenes, whose glow and atmospheric subtlety were much admired in their time but can hardly even be assessed now. For in pursuit of jewel-like effects and deep layering of color, Ryder painted "lean over fat," so that slower-drying strata of paint underneath pulled the quicker-drying surface apart. He would slosh abominable messes of varnish on the surface, and pile up the pigment by incessant retouching until the images became quaking pitch lakes...
...this holiday season it will be greater than ever. During the past year, 63.7 billion pieces of third-class mail found their way into mailboxes across the nation. For tens of millions of Americans, the seasonal tide, as faithful as the first snow or the appearance of tinsel and colored lights, has started to rise. Letter boxes are filled to bursting with envelopes of every size and color, living rooms and kitchens are suddenly cluttered with mail on all available surfaces, and wastebaskets are overflowing with the sale not made...
...still proceeds as if no one has told him that the cold war is over. North Korea seems stuck in some vanished black-and-white era of dark, Soviet-made limousines and gray, featureless concrete blocks (when a visitor pulls out a camera, a local asks him, in astonishment, "Color?"). The dominant image of the capital is of neatly dressed people in groups walking soundlessly through silent avenues of empty high-rises...