The hardest thing about watercolor is retraining one’s eyes
to see differently. Highlights are created with the glowing white of untouched
paper and to manage that, one must begin any picture not by painting that which
the eye is naturally drawn to—the shine and light of the foreground—but rather
by working from the deepest of the shadows outward into the light.
Shadows spill across the canvas with each stroke of the brush,
deftly slipping around the penciled boundaries of the bright places, pooling in
the dark corners and in the undergrowth of the painting. Depth is just layered shadows;
each pass of the brush grows lighter than the previous as the pigment leaks out
until there is no shadow color at all dripping from the end of the brush—until all
that remains is a bright haunting tint in a wash of water. The light in the
painting arises from the pattern of shadows and the method is concealed in the
result: where I see the jagged edges of a black spine bleeding into green, the
viewer sees the soft fronds of white pine.
It is an odd feeling to paint with shadows. When I first
began, I sometimes felt that, until I was done, I was denied the beauty of what
I painted. It is true that when I paint I am lost in a world of dark veins and
gently fading splotches as my gradients and outlines spin away from the object
I seek to render. It is true that I must focus on the negative space—the places
where the picture is not. So it has taken me some time to adjust to that and to
see the beauty in the process as well as in the product, to appreciate the
shadows for what there were and not merely for what they would become. But now
it is darkly fascinating to me that the image I see when I create, the alien
reverse of the familiar, is so entirely overpowered by the illusion of light
when I step away from the canvas at the end. Those who look upon it will not
see what I have seen. It is an unknown mystery to them, a whole hidden world. Unless
they too are versed in that great secret of the art: that to paint the light is
really to paint the shadows which define it.
The same, I think, can be said about the creation of us as
beings.
I said something similar before (this is on the “To Slay the
Waxen One” page already, but I quote myself here to save you the trouble of
scrolling down to it):
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If you’ve ever read a story with flawless “mary-sue”
characters, you already know something about people who have no flaws: they
have no existence either. Flaws make a character because ultimately, flaws, and
how they impact human actions are what make us who we are. Flaws are the reason
that each of us reacts differently to a situation. Bound up in our “issues” and
“baggage” is the core of our being. It’s what makes us, and characters, real.
Scrub away the flaws and you are left with a hollow doll. This can happen to
people. Perfectionists go beyond fixing the broken bits that hold them back to
erasing the flaws that make them who they are. They uncreate themselves.
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Flaws are something like the shadows the gods use to paint
us into existence, to bring out the highlights of our better traits and reveal
the image of who we are. It is startling to notice the shadows which define us
much as it is difficult to paint from negative space: we are not used to
looking at the world, and ourselves, with an eye for shadow. So when we first
become aware of them, we reject them as something ugly merely because we are
not used to seeing the beauty of the painting in the individual brush strokes
but rather see it only in the illusion of the whole.
We forget that the brightest candle flame is surrounded by the
deepest and richest colors of existence. We ignore the colors of the “dark”
because we are accustomed to mentally short handing those colors as “black”. But
I invite you to look sometime and see what the painter knows: there is actually
very little pure black in the world. Most shadows are a mix of umber and navy
and ultraviolet and marine and red and gold. The best shadow is made not with
black but with a combination of colors because it looks more natural.
Flaws too are only on rare occasion wholly black in nature.
More often there are subtleties and gradients within them that enhance the
being as a whole. Light and, I do not hesitate to add, radiance are not just a
measure of brightness but equally a measure of the darkness which surrounds it.
So it is that even your own sacred radiance is not only to be found in the
parts of you that shine, but also in the shadows you cast.
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