a color digest: reflected forms by david b. milne

The featured image was a trademark style of David B. Milne: two dimensional, expressive, water color on pencil landscape.

It was odd how David B. Milne used the color, black. Usually, people used the dark color to trace or shape objects. Nope. Not David. He preferred to draw fluid shapes of them which would represent the deciduous trees leave and the shadows reflecting on the water. Remember, he was drawing watercolors on landscape. He didn't even use black to add a shade to other colors. Black had its own entity. Its own space within the painting. 

Why did he do this? How did he get away with this?

Painted 1917, "Reflected Forms" by David B. Milne was a water color landscape paintings. His trademark use of black stood out. 

Megan Jenkins, who wrote this article in Canadian Art,  discussed his preference with colors. 

Like Henri Matisse, he embraced colour over line ...

His color technique was similar to Fauvism, a movement that Matisse fore fronted. Instead of bright highlighted color in Fauvism, David B. Milne experimented with the opposite, dark.  

As you can see, a good half of this landscape used black. Not a shade of black, not a type of black. It was matte black. This color carried a weight.

I investigated whether the landscape was set in the day or night. But, the use of colors in a natural or local state didn't tell a consistent setting. The rolling blue hills suggested night and the white sky suggested day. The reflections of the trees suggested day, but the "reflected forms" (which were represented in black) alluded a night scene. The tree's leaves were black but some parts of the tree were colored. The natural state of colors did not apply in the painting. So what did colors do here?

I looked for more answers through David's journal which contained comments about his painting process. 

The use of black was a solution to trees interaction with light:

"The black 'cores' of the trees, a convention started in a watercolor made in 1915 from near Fun Hill Road... This started from the need of a convention to represent trees looked at against the light where they showed a dark shadowed part surrounded by an illuminated part." David B. Milne

It has to be a night time painting. Sun light doesn't illuminate quite as well as a bright moon. 

But, in the grand scheme of the picture, why does he use black sparingly? I believed that the painter wanted unity via compressing to grab the essence he felt with the landscape. David simplified the details in order to display the aesthetic emotion. 

"a unity gained by compressing [by pressing detail into] - David B. Milne

With the constraint of watercolor, David's use of color solved a problem and unifying the colors via compression created an aesthetic emotion. Those processes together was the painting, not the landscape. 

The painting, "Reflected Forms" alluded to an aesthetic emotion via landscape. David's use of black simplified the tedious details (at least to him) that are rather common in landscape in order to bring out what mattered the most.

Will the viewer experience an emotion?