Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/276

LANDSCAPE PAINTING you remember that ever since the day of our birth we have been storing our minds with thousands upon thousands of facts—very useful facts, too, in their way, facts whose possession and unconscious daily use are essential to our very physical existence. But when, as artists, we go into the open, to study and to dream, they rise before us like a miasma, a deadly cloud that obscures the whole face of nature; so that we see the landscape not as it is, but as we have been taught in some former stage of existence that it should be.

Among the facts that have thus been clamped upon us there are two alas! which have been learned by everybody—that trees are green and that the sky is blue. It matters not that the sky is often pale green, or violet, or pearl-gray or opal, blue it is painted forever and forever; and the trees are painted green [216]