All along the Pacific Northwest coast—from San Francisco to Vancouver, B.C.— and in and around the islands of Puget Sound, mist, or heavy fog settles. It modifies the ordinarily firm edges of houses, fences, buildings, and their inhabitants. It softens, too, the limited boundaries of images.
Plants with names like “Mist Maiden,” or “Dreamland,” illustrate how indirect light touches the overall shape of a dwarf rhododendron, the contours of leaves and flower petals in the Pacific Northwest. In a garden all seems calm, soft and mutable. A veil of mist settles, then shifts through my field of inner, as well as outer vision. The images that float through transform themselves. A junco, a squirrel, a child and her/his toy are, and are not. Their very existence is in flux. In this way images appear, disappear and re-appear forcing my mind to notice and focus my attention on their shifting shapes.
From these filmy shapes a character’s personality and stories emerge. At his book launch for PEANUT BUTTER & JELLY, Ben Clanton told his readers that it was when the image of a waffle ice cream cone tossed about in his mind with some photos of narwhals in a non-fiction book he had been reading that he first recalled the idea of his character, Super Narwhal. In the story of BUB, Elizabeth Rose Stanton’s middle child decides to erase himself, to become invisible. The “Mistress of fog,” Julie Kim, paints, then lifts some vibrant pigments to create a fog setting as the children search in WHERE”S HALMONI? Bonnie Becker has said in a book launch that a grumpy voice lodged in her mind declaring, “No Visitors,” as the seed for A VISITOR FOR BEAR was planted. Thoughts and ideas arise on the misty edges of the mind.
Indirect light affects the mind, not just our outer vision. It feels like a damp cloud hovers over one’s brain, where images develop, swell, fade, only to re-appear with more insistence. In some of my watercolors I suggest this occurrence.
Here, a child holds a tiny green frog in the cool fog. |
Two sisters play at the beach on a hazy day. |
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I have been translating these cloudy moods into the acrylic gouache medium, too.
Tao and Hong splash through a waterfall. |
A crow delivers a key before a wintry sunrise. |
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Without the harsh precision of direct light, an idea, a character is free to evolve without too much scrutiny, or by being pinned down, or examined too soon. In 1981, Professor emeritus of Tokyo University, Kimura Shozaburo described the WORLD OF INDIRECT LIGHT: “The greenery of the rainy season is indescribably beautiful. Wet with rain, the tree leaves have a most vivid color, though their outlines are blurred. There is no sunlight to make a sharp distinction between light and shade, and the shape of these things is not necessarily clearly defined under a cloudy sky or in a mist. However, due to the fact that it is a world of indirect light, a certain amount of light finds its way to the parts which, under direct sunlight, would be darkly blotted out as shade; the rainy sky makes the shadowed parts stand out, and light and shade run together.”His description is the way I frequently view my own garden in Normandy Park, near Puget Sound. The leaves of the morning garden are frequently wet from October through April, when the cove is blurred by mist, and fog blankets Vashon Island from view.
Ideas seek one out, decide to visit for awhile, irregardless of how one’s mind might be otherwise occupied.These images are insistent and envelop the mind like mist, they gift us with their presence. Professor Kimura postulates that Japanese culture truly exists in a world of indirect light where light and shade, friend and foe, man and woman constantly merge together to create a third world of serene and harmonious beauty in which there is no yes or no. I feel that in the Pacific Northwest an artist, a writer, a child is free to inhabit this harmonious space where no gulf separates opposites.