He said that he likes to paint “mountain streams when the water
is shallow, and the tones at the bottom are rich reddish-orange
and black, and the water is seen at an angle which exactly
divides the visible colors between those of the stones and that
of the sky, and the sky is of clear, full, blue. The resulting
purple, obtained by the blending of the blue and the orange-red,
broken by the play of innumerable gradations in the stones, is
indescribably lovely.” I don’t know if I succeeded in capturing
what he was talking about, but he sure has a wonderful way of
describing the colors of mountain streams. I’ve noticed that
when you look at a stream with gray stones and clear water on a
sunny day, there’s far more color beneath the surface of the
water than above it. What I’ve been trying to understand, and am
still grappling with (maybe you can help me), is why the stones
on a shallow bottom of the stream shift to warm, brownish
colors, and then the colors get progressively cooler as you go
deeper than about th