Lilla Cabot Perry: Family Recollections, Pt. 2

"Edith Perry" (detail) by Lilla Cabot Perry

"In Lilla Cabot Perry's indoor portrait she used earth colors, but for landscape she chose more ethereal paints. She never used black. She taught me about the juxtaposition of opposite colors in nature - glimpses of earth in a green mass look pink or rose, a wholly pink subject has green wherever the pink separates, etc Indeed, she made me find opposite colors for myself by staring at a color hard and then at a white ceiling. Opposite colors are nature's way, she explained, of resting the eyes from too much of one color. She said I should paint what I saw without mentally defining it so as not to paint it in its local color but to allow for changes brought about by the atmosphere or by the reflection of color from surrounding objects or from the sun.

She taught me how to paint a blue sky so that it actually looked like sky, not a blue wall. Where sky met earth she used viridian and white on one brush and alizarin crimson and white on another, with occasionally a little yellow and white on a third brush used close to the horizon These separate puddles of paint on her palette had to be of the exact same value. She would play them onto the canvas, keeping each brush clean by wiping it on a rag she held with her palette. Her skies were always vibrant and stayed back where they belonged in the picture. When painting a mountain against the sky she use a fine brush to outline the mountain in alizarin crimson. Within the line she painted first the sky and then the mountain. The joining looked just right.

She had observed that sun flecks on the ground are round Once when I took her to observe a solar eclipse, she was thrilled to note that the sun flecks on the ground became crescent shaped, thus confirming her observation."

(Excerpts from 'Family Recollections of Lilla Cabot Perry' by Lilla Levitt, Anita English, and Elizabeth (Elsie) Lyon in "Lilla Cabot Perry: An American Impressionist" by Meredith Martindale.)