Strange Light

“For the listener who listens in snow…”

I’m not sure that artists really have down time. I can take a vacation from work-the-thing-that-pays-the-bills, but I can’t not be an artist. Still, I try to give myself some fallow time in winter and let family and friends and holiday jolliness fill my days.

But continuing on the theme introduced in my last post, Symbolism Lost and Found, winter for me is intensely beautiful; crisp and stark and fragile and still. The light of winter is strange. The atmosphere does odd things to how light is processed by the camera and the eye. The experience of a fall of snow and a world silenced by ice produce in me something in equal parts giddy joy and a sense of alarm as if the weather were tapping into the delight of childhood and the fear in the primitive rat brain all at once. The sun of December is not the sun of June. And you have to be a part of it.

While visiting family in Oklahoma and while in the midst of a ferocious series of winter storms here in the Pacific Northwest (relatively speaking – we just aren’t accustomed to days of snow and ice), I went walking. How could I not bring along my camera?

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

-Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man

We’re still buried under snow and ice, but I’m beginning to shake off the grip of winter and it’s time to get back to work. I can smell Spring coming this way…