There is probably little argument that one of the biggest challenges facing a painter is to see the subject in a way that will allow him or her to translate the vision into the two dimensional space. Too often the mind carries preconceptions that are attached to images, and thus, when we sit down to paint the tree before us, often we end up painting the tree that is in our mind, the tree we first drew as children - big solid brown trunk, round green leafiness. It takes effort to focus enough to see the changes in tone, to detect slight temperature differences, or to recognize that some lines are lost and blend into another element.
I have spent months of study trying to acquire better vision for painting, and I recall moments when suddenly it became clear to me: driving down the freeway I would marvel at the tonal changes in the passing trees, the delicate differences that made them real; I witnessed how dark were the areas of wet pavement, how sky-like the flections. I imagined mixing the color to match what I was seeing. This seeing went on for miles, almost a hallucination of sorts, though I assume hallucination to mean seeing something that is not there, rather than seeing what is there but what most people don't really see. But like driving while hallucinating, it was probably not the safest way to navigate a vehicle down the highway, and I try to do it less, unless I am alone on a long straight road.
But trying to see has become an exercise I work on frequently, and though I have lately been caught up in business that does not allow me the time or leisure to paint, I thought that on my latest trip I would take along my sketchbook and use the idle moments for some drawing. It did not happen.
I found myself in southwest Iowa in mid-March, and I was surprised that winter still dominated the land; it was cold and bleak, with no budding trees, no spring flowers, no green to be found. At first I tried to think of a word that would best describe the color I saw, and the closest I came up with was "dun". A very bland, dull color, sapped of life by the hard winter. Undulating fields of cornstalks chopped off near the ground, dead and beige and unremarkable. Every little farm had its silos, iconic in a way, and I thought they might make a good subject. But as I drove I found there were few places to pull off the road, no public parks or areas set aside for recreation: do Iowans just drive like hell through the snowstorm and get where they are going, all business and no pleasure?
At any rate, I tried hard to turn on my "vision" and found that it was unavailable to me. For the life of me, I couldn't see the beauty that I was certain surrounded me. I took a few snapshots as a record of my journey, but I was surprised by how uninspired I was. Perhaps it was a reaction against the lingering winter. More likely my mind was too preoccupied with another sort of vision, a seeing for the truth in numbers, a cataloguing of physical properties of the real estate I was investigating. The demands on my vision were great - "see" as much as possible in a very short time, and there was no room left for shifting the vision to the other sort required for painting. I think the resources of the mind are limited sometimes, and yet I was surprised by how little choice I had in the matter.
Upon my return I pulled up my photos from the trip, and with a little enhancement the richness of the colors jumped out at me: there was color there all along, and I had been unable to see it. I hope that in future trips I will be able to see it while there, but in a sort of apology to the beauty that is Iowa, I present at a minimum these photographs as a testament to color.
