You have to think about sunlight to appreciate its impact on your life as it is, and has been. We know that exposure to light is a necessary component of life and that people act more graciously and are less dour on sunny days. I know I am less of a curmudgeon. But these are aspects of light we normally just accept as givens. Given the choice, we want sun, and when it’s obscured behind gray clouds for days on end, as it often is around here, we pine for its return.
Grain Stacks
My very first conscious memory is of sunlight illuminating the shingled roof of a house next door, which my new eyes could see out my nursery window. I was about two years old. The details of the roof have faded (I was peering out through the rails of my crib, after all), but one thing I very much remember was that the sky that day was not blue, but white. All these years later, I feel I am reliving a moment in my infancy on those days — usually very hot or bright — when the sky is white with thin clouds that only barely screen the sun. On such days, I find myself transported back to that moment in my crib as I tried to make sense of the world beyond myself.
From these and similar experiences, I’ve concluded that filed away in my subconscious mind — and perhaps in yours, as well — are memories that are like templates of days. These templates form in our earliest years, and are composed of elemental senses, and they stay with us. The effect is eerie yet also pleasant: every day is different from the last, of course, but some days jog our memory bank until it locates the identical day template from a prior (most likely much earlier) experience. Sunlight seems to dominate the memory fragment, more than sound or smell. We all vividly recall the particular circumstances of certain days, such as especially fun vacation days, or the dampness of a rainy spring afternoon. What I am attempting to explain is something more basic: revisiting a certain set of circumstances that we experienced very early in life that is suddenly floods into our consciousness. These circumstances, I believe, are most recalled as involving some aspect of light, which is the first of the senses we have to grapple with.
I’m not talking about the well-known sense of deja vu that we all experience. Those moments are mind tricks that cause us to believe we are reliving prior events, usually a conversation or a chance encounter, when in fact we are not. We have felt days before, going back early in our lives when light and shadow and colors were just sorting themselves out in our nascent minds.
Street Winter Sunlight and Snow
Thus, I invariably feel in the watery light of winter a cold Minnesota afternoon and the sting of snow on my chin as I fell face first from a sled. In a similar way, crisp, sunny winter days are all brittle and snap, just like the day my father let me ride with him to the gas station — a huge concession on his part and a momentous event for me. Summer thunderstorms brewing in roiling pewter clouds looming behind shimmering green and silver leaves cause me to become fearful, just like the day, as a toddler, when I was left out in the front yard as everyone scampered for cover. The light that at that moment, which I have seen many times since, was suffused in pink.
Which brings me to a consideration of the art of painting, and how accomplished painters are able to capture the visual depiction of light and also its visceral essence. No matter their style or “school,” artists as varied as Constable and Diebenkorn, Van Gogh and Vermeer, all possess the uncanny ability to capture their own day templates for the world to see.
Sunday Morning
Edward Hopper’s “Sunday Morning,” for example, is surely not a study of deserted urban streetscape. It’s about (to me, anyway) loneliness and isolation. In his evocation of a moment in time, Hopper portrays sadness as — masterfully — sunlight.
Other painters, especially Impressionists, use light (and shadow) to elevate our understanding of nature to the realm of revelation. Monet, for example, devoted a series of paintings of grain stacks as seen through different natural light settings. His intention in these paintings was to portray how perception and emotion are conditioned by the external environment; how sunshine (or the intensity of light by season) alters both the perspective and the emotional resonance of the scene. These paintings, to me, are Monet’s day templates — visions of early life, when he first embraced sunlight.
Monet’s grain stack series points to another facet of the treatment of light in art. Painters deal with ambient light by the way it reflects off objects, and also by focusing on the effects of weather, clouds especially, on the strength and vividness of light.
Bulb Field
Van Gogh’s “Bulb Fields,” painted in 1883, focuses on a large field of flowers. The thing that catches my eye, and creates a shudder of recognition, is his treatment of thin, scudding clouds and the wan, diffused light that unifies the composition. In seeing it, I am recalling a day template from somewhere in my past.
The brilliant insight of artists like these is that light — and in particular, sunlight — is an emotional sense, and not only a physical one. The exceptional artists have, over the ages, rendered light through the lens of emotion and memory. We’re the better for it, because when we come across a Pissaro pastoral scene or Winslow Homer landscape, our delight is two-fold. We are looking at great art. And we are seeing, again, a memory of a moment in our early life.
I enjoyed reading this post as always.
I looked at those paintings you have included and clearly notice the way the artists use light to convey mood and emotion as you have indicated. However, as Jeanne alluded to her in her comment, I think I have only taken particular notice to this since you have brought it to our attention. “Ahh, now I see it” indeed.
I recently finished reading Tom Robbins novel “Jitterbug Perfume.” In this novel, he repeatedly refers to the sense of smell and how it is intricately tied to memory. Some of the passages in the book evoke a similar reaction regarding the sense-t0-memory chain as your posting. Esp regarding the link between later memories transporting you back to a time in early life.
I try to capture my childhood memories of light – but it is not sunlight I remember but the moon light caught from the corner of my room through the curl of a window shade. Or a smell perhaps – of my grandmother or a jar of pennies or the new furniture smell from a dining room server that was rarely opened so it kept it’s showroom fragrance.
The feel of a rose petal between your forefinger and thumb for the first time – the velvet softness. Or the cold newness of beach sand at night. The shadows and splashes of color that dance through a lightly leaved tree in the summer. The taste of apricots and plums. These are the sensory experiences I associate with my memories.
I think artists like you see light differently – feel it differently – live it differently and therefore make the rest of us sit up and take notice and say to ourselves wistfully “ahhh, now I see it,…”