yellow + blue = green

We have a friend, an art collector, with a fabulous eye, who doesn't like paintings with a lot of green and she doesn't much like paintings with words ... (we love her anyway).

It's true that if I had to choose, I would probably say I like to paint with blue, or orange, and white and black... green may be low on my preference scale... and yet. There are so many greens, if we are lucky:

These are from a five-minute period of pretty intense sun around the house this afternoon.

I once audited a class where the professor had a direct translation, he said, for all the key terms in e.e. cummings' poems.  The word"green" in the phrase "All in green went my love riding" meant, as I remember: youth, naivete, beauty, ripeness... (possibly, he drew these descriptions from Shakespeare's Cleopatra, who says she could only have ever been in love with Caesar when she was in "My salad days/ When I was green in judgment").  And yet, in the cummings poem, green isn't so naive; "my love" wears a hunting "horn" and a "bow" and arrows fill the air and, in the end, "four lean hounds crouched low and smiling/ my heart fell dead before." Dangerous, for the narrator, and dangerous, too, for the professor to claim too much.

Here are my means of making at least a few greens:

And here is a detail from a painting... decidedly not exactly "youth, naivete, beauty, ripeness" alone: