Lofty Dryness, Robert Berkeley Green

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“That’s Blue Mound in the background. The title Lofty Dryness is a Zen phrase, both the title and the way I did the watercolor. I made the painting autumnal. One of the canons of Zen was to eliminate everything right down to the bone, to get to what’s essential. This was an area we called the big red field, because it had all this Indian grass and the Indian grass was in seed. I started working in a more personal use of Zen with some quiet understatement of color. I mixed a Zen green, a Zen blue with a hint of blue in the dark tone, and then an ochre in the dark tone. The four colors were blue, green, ochre and black.”