I took a painting class once, in college. It was when I was at Bennington. This was an “Introduction to Painting” class and the other students, like myself, were not art majors and had little previous experience drawing or painting. The teacher wanted us to learn about light. She started us working with charcoal on rough white drawing paper. We were to draw trees with special attention to shadows and light. She made us notice the way the bark was rough and mottled with shades of gray and brown on the side where the sun fell upon it, but was just a flat black surface on the shaded side. She set up still-life arrangements in the studio. A clear vase, a couple of green pears, a white bowl on a bunched-up red velvety cloth draped across a table. She shone a light on the tableau and had us just use charcoal and chalk to draw the scene. She wanted us to notice the shapes and patterns, but most of all she wanted us to be aware of light. It seemed to be the most important, the most fundamental thing in painting.
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I love the unique brilliance of winter light and have been trying to capture it in photographs. My hope is that I can use the photos to help me with some scenes I’ve been working on. I’ve found that my favorite passages in books involve the artful depiction of shadow and light. I love when a writer uses light skillfully to pull us into a scene. Here is an example of a beautiful use of color and pattern and light from a short story by John Updike called “After the Storm.”
“The room was radiant. Beyond the white mullions and the curtains of dotted swiss, pinned back with metal flowers painted white, the sky was undiluted blue. I thought, this morning has never occurred before, and I jubilantly felt myself to be on the prow of a ship cleaving the skyey ocean of time.”
Now, brace yourself for something quite incredible. This is one of the last paragraphs in the story and it shows why Updike is considered a true master of literature. The story, by the way, is told from the perspective of a young boy who is now in bed with a fever. I can’t help but believe it’s an autobiographical rendering of the birth of the author’s impulse to absorb beauty and nature and light in order to reproduce it later, with words.
“I turned my head away and looked through the window. In time, my father appeared in this window, an erect figure dark against the snow. His posture made no concession to the pull underfoot; upright he waded out through our yard and past the mailbox and up the hill until he was lost to my sight behind the trees of our orchard. The trees took white on their sun side. The two telephone wires diagonally cut the blank blue of the sky. The bare stone wall was a scumble of umber; my father’s footsteps thumbs of white in white. I knew what this scene was – a patch of Pennsylvania in 1947 – and yet I did not know, was in my softly fevered state mindlessly soaked in a rectangle of colored light. I burned to paint it, just like that, in its puzzle of glory; it came upon me that I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.”
The idea of the author being perfectly submissive to the scene, being transparent. What a lesson for me.
While typing this, my Word program protested the use of the words “skyey” and “scumble.” These aren’t words, declared Microsoft Word.
Tell that to John Updike, Word!.
What could better describe a stonewall in winter than a “scumble of umber?”
Here are some photos I took yesterday in the late afternoon, when there were a great many shadows.
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