The Luminous Effect of the Whole
Applying Rembrandt's Statement of Drawing
The bus drops us in the wheat fields and foothills that make up the landscape of Provence. Whorls of thyme and rosemary still root in the cracking soil. I am dissuaded from setting up my easel next to the small fishing stream because it is too difficult a motif, my teacher Alan advises, especially for someone like me who had never painted en plein air before. My only preparation for this foray was reading Rembrandt’s Statement on Drawing and a few studio sketches.
The sketch of the whole emphasizing the essential elements … should already express the character of the represented objects.
Now I am lost in the overwhelming swath of landscape before me: the plain trees, the rushing volume of the Mont Sainte-Victoire, the aching absence of sky, and the dramatic unity of all nature. Then I see it right ahead of me– a spark of inspiration, shimmering along the road, its tail flicking back and forth as it trots closer. A cat! I learn that she belongs to the farmhouse I later bring up on my canvas with rosy yellow oil paint, the color of afternoon tea, the warmth of plucked notes on a double bass. I stall setting up by stroking her soft fur, but eventually Alan guides me back to the task at hand. I lengthen the legs of the wooden easel and secure the canvas onto its neck. Using the oval of my hands, I discover the motif I will sketch: a narrow paved road leading up into the arching boughs of the trees, fractures of the mountain in between branches. The attention-seeking cat finds a seat in the sketchpad, blocking my pencil from the paper. Even when I moved her off, she remained close by, curled by my feet.
Contours should be drawn, not in a continuing manner, but rather fragment by fragment, with a lightness of hand, that the object be not closed but open to the light, that it may breathe in the enveloping atmosphere.
When I finished a rough sketch, I returned back to the canvas. I made a decisive mark which I then immediately doubted, so I swabbed a paper towel into turpentine and swiped the paint off. I could not commit to my artwork. Alan approached and told me, I don’t feel your usual joy this morning. He snatched the brush from my hands and struck the void of white with patches of green, the sharp swoops taking the character of umbrella pines. I’ll
Painting the landscape of Aix en Provence during an Arts and Creative Writing Program at the Leo Marchutz School.
take 10% of the royalties, he joked and then left me alone to produce my own strokes of the motif.
Slowly, the concentric forms emerge with my brush, the thrum of newly-hatched cigales, the passing cars that cheer for us artists, the fragments of the mountain. I let yellow leaves bounce off violet rock, red clay run into green boughs, and blue sky crunch up to orange trunks. I break each color with its complement, creating my own symphony in a world paralleling life. The light changes before me, shadows shortening.
The placement of the shadows is very important …. It is the placement of the shadows and their harmonious rapport upon which depends the luminous effect of the whole.
Lost in my painting, I miss the moment when a mother hangs up white shirts and towels on the laundry line for her family, the same family that named the cat Cappucine. I am not the first painting student she will comfort, nor am I the last, but I felt a swell of gratefulness for her whiskers brushing against my leg. Patches of white canvas remain uncovered in order to let the incandescent light shine through. I revel in each stroke, each concrete commitment to art. I dip my brush into a red-blue-yellow tertiary that contains all the colors of the universe to render Cappucine, who now winds her body around both my legs and the easel’s. I capture my first memory of her on the light-streaked path, a beam of joy with perked ears. With a flourish of my brush, she breathes out of one world and into another.
One must leave the paper the power to act by itself in order to give birth to the light.