Studio: international art (85.1923)

SOME PAINTINGS BY ORLANDO GREENWOOD

In the painting of these graceful little
groups he works up from a dark ground,
often almost black, to the highest light.
This process gives a depth, solidity and
finish often lacking to a more direct method,
which may have superior qualities of
freshness and vivacity. He has his method
at his fingers' ends, and uses it with a skill
which is as perfect as need be. It is much
the same method he relies on in portraiture
—but of that more anon, a a a
So far, Mr. Greenwood has kept within
the bounds of obvious realism. He has
adventured only into the most apparent
province of the painter, the happy hunting-
ground of the technician, who, sure of
himself, is above everything the accom-
plished painter of the thing seen, of that
and little else. The exploitation of the

more abstract qualities of art with which
the numerous schools of modern painters,
successfully or not, are so profoundly
concerned he has left untouched. The
weaving of forms, design and colour into
a poetry of harmony—an essential music—
abandoning the more obvious realism,
except in so far as it fills such a purpose—
represents the further hemisphere of art
which he has not yet attempted to navigate.

Perhaps it is not his metier ; and in his
own line, well defined, he may pass for a
master. a a a a a

Still Life, as a vehicle of artistic expres-
sion, although capable of an infinite
variety of arrangement and colour har-
mony, is, in one direction—that of vrai-
semblance, with its danger of triviality—
a limited one. The things arranged may be

208

"KING ARTHUR AND THE KNIGHTS
OF THE ROUND TABLE.” OIL PAINT-
ING BY ORLANDO GREENWOOD