Here in the Lower Mainland spring arrives earlier than in the rest of Canada, and we are blessed with a wonderful multitude of colours as the season unfolds. Our trees and plants provide incredible shades of green, the sky colours from sunset red to greys and intense blue, and the waters of our lakes, rivers and the sea reflect all.
This astonishing variety is vital to our lives, and yet its origin is equally amazing. Every colour we know is derived from red, blue and yellow, named the primary colours. Mixing these produces the secondary colours of green, orange and purple.
Add black and white and the colours of the world are at your fingertips if you learn how to mix them. This is the challenge that has faced artists, entrepreneurs, explorers, nations and humanity for millennia.
Exaggeration? Not really.
Thanks to our ever-increasing technical skills, we are able to delve further and further into the origins of man, and arguably some of the most amazing discoveries are cave paintings found in 1994 in southern France.
These Paleolithic paintings were done more than 30,000 years ago and "signed" by the artists' handprints.
About 8,000 years ago still-active mines in northern Afghanistan were producing an extraordinarily beautiful semi-precious intense blue stone we know as lapis lazuli. This can be carved and polished as sculpture, or ground and mixed as paint, as happened when the rock reached Europe in the Middle Ages. The gorgeous, rare and very costly intense ultramarine blue produced was much in demand by Renaissance artists, who mostly reserved its use for religious paintings.
However, one of the best-known paintings displaying exceptional use of ultramarine is Johannes Vermeer's Girl With A Pearl
Earring, completed in 1665. The painting is usually in the Royal Picture Gallery, where South Delta Artists Guild artist Coral Gurney studied it during her threeyear attendance at the American Academy of Art in Holland.
Gurney's near same-size copy of this painting is currently on display (not for sale) in the South Delta Artists Guild's Living Colour show and sale running through April 27 at Gallery 1710.
The show features original oils, watercolours, mixed media and collage on the walls as well as a new selection of work in the Shrink Wrap Bin, which contains matted and shrink wrapped prints ready to frame.
Gallery 1710, which is adjacent to the South Delta Recreation Centre at 1710-56th St., is open to the public Thursday to Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. For more information about the show visit the guild's website at www.southdeltaartistsguild.com.
