Another device used to "knit" or integrate a picture is the interpenetration of color. This non-objective composition by Stuart Davis does not employ "passages" anywhere, yet it is held together partly by juxtaposing every color with every other color across the surface. The blue touches both shades of red, the white, the black, and the green. The same goes for each of the other colors.
A more common device is to severely limit the color scheme to variations on one hue. This illustration by N. C. Wyeth featuring the cramped interior of a ship rolling in a choppy sea is confined to one color, excepting a couple of strokes indicating the bird's feathers.
Pierre Renoir undertook this picture of people, boats, houses, the river, sky with clouds and wove them all together by applying small touches of color across the surface. There are touches of blue nearly everywhere, as well as bits of red. There is yellow in the water, on the ground, on the people, house, sky. The interpenetration of color keeps everything tied in to everything else and no one area separates itself from the rest of the painting.
In this painting, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec achieved wholeness and integrity by means of a different technique. He began with a panel of cardboard sealed with orange shellac. He drew and painted on this ocherish surface, but left areas of the warm ground uncovered. Like a key, which unites the parts of a musical composition, the color underneath unites the sheets, bed cover, wall and skin into a harmonious whole.
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