Crawford, looking at the blue sky on the maquette, then at the blue paint for the canvas, turns and says, “You know, when I first mixed it, I didn’t know I’d have to actually reproduce it. I thought there would be”—and here she lowers her voice as if sharing a confidence—“some little piece of electronic equipment that would scan it automatically. But no, it’s visual. First I do it in a small amount, and then we have to enlarge it, and every time you exponentially enlarge it, with the same proportions, it doesn’t always work, because one color has a stronger presence or loses its presence in larger quantities. So every time we go larger, we need to adjust the proportions.”

The American Scholar, Spring 2009 > Grant Rosenberg: A Twombly Ceiling: Letter from Paris about Cy Twombly and Barbara Crawford painting the ceiling of the Louvre's Salles des Bronzes. Langer Werkstattbericht über die Arbeit an Cy Twomblys Deckengemälde für den Louvre.