Alchemy of Our Surroundings

Henry Beston wrote the Outermost House in 1926. In it he described the year he lived in a small shack on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, which stands far out to sea on the coastline of the country. Much of that yellowed book takes my heart every time I read it, but there’s one passage that stands out in terms of the subject on my mind:
The inevitable morphing of all conditions or substances into another.

“For twenty miles this last and outer earth faces the ever hostile ocean in the form of a great eroded cliff of earth and clay, the undulations and levels of whose rim now stand a hundred, now a hundred and fifty feet above the tides. Worn by the breakers and the rains, disintegrated by the wind, it still stands bold. Many earths compose it, and many gravels and sands stratified and intermingled. It has many colors: old ivory here, peat here, and here old ivory darkened and enriched with rust. At twilight, [with] it’s rim lifted to the splendor in the west, the face of the wall becomes a substance of shadow and dark descending to the eternal unquiet of the sea; at dawn the sun rising out of the ocean gilds it with a level silence of light which thins and rises and vanishes into day.”

Any time I read that, I can see/feel the Great Substances intermingling to become something else, something new, something renewed. Water substances, air surfaces and force, temperature activity, and Light. How to paint that???

Let me add a small story of my own, one that got repeated over many different seasons.
This particular time, I was walking on a rural road in very late winter, probably in March. I noticed that the snow banks along the road had thawed and refrozen so that tiny air pockets had formed, along with large crystals that were picking up and refracting light. The remaining snow in the adjacent fields was in the same condition. And in the gold and blue morning light, as the thaw began again, something moist was lifting up, with the clear smell of earth. Is this the moment “ it feels like spring”?

I remembered that moment enough to look for it another late winter morning the next years, until it became part of the calendar. And part of my mindset. And, I see, a good description of something I constantly search for in my painting - a visual of that morphing of conditions into something else. Beston saw it in the passing of day into night and back again, but in a much larger context than just changes of light.

As always, I really can’t “intend” to paint this bit of alchemy - I wouldn’t know where to start. But I do search for it in the shapes and patterns and lines that my hand makes. Here’s the thing: it’s blessed hard to put these observations into words - I recognize the concept in my painting much more readily than crafting words to describe it. But I will probably keep trying here, because it’s at the heart of what I so much want to convey.
Here’s a recent painting that comes close to fitting the bill for me.

I’ll leave you to see what you see.

Thanks so much for joining me.

And please feel free to share with your friends.