"I am a Rock"

This morning I paused while crossing a wooden foot bridge and gazed at the brook below. The late morning sun hung in a cloudless southern sky. My goal was to attempt to understand the effect that the mottled sunlight and slowly moving water had on the objects upon which they played - specifically a rock. It wasn’t that cold and I had time on my hands.

My mother was an artist. She might observe such a scene and, through the prism of her mind, use her hand, brush, and pallet of paints to create her visual interpretation of the scene on a canvas or piece of paper. I’d seen her do it countless times.

I am an artist as well, but possess mostly the ability to write and lead you, the reader, to visualize what I saw through your mind’s eye as opposed to your actual eye.

Occasionally I wonder about such things.

My friend Betsy is an artist – a painter and a singer (she’d challenge me on the latter.) Yesterday during dinner, I asked her how she had become a painter.

“I’ve always been able to paint,” she replied.

“Always, like since always!?” I queried. How far back is always and how do you know when you actually have what might be considered a talent, I wondered to myself?

“Since elementary school, I was the kid who could draw and paint," she went on. “Teachers recognized it and, for the most part, encouraged it.”

In that regard, she was like my mother. A difference was that mom went to art school while Betsy went to a liberal arts college. Both continued their lives while their once burgeoning artistic talents were turned into avocational endeavors. After kids, after dad, mom began to paint again. Betsy kept her skills alive by using vacation time to attend painting workshops with well know artists.

“What would you learn,” I asked? “I mean, what could another artist teach you that would make you a better painter? Is it about the paint, the paper, the brush, the canvas...” I had run out of variables. I was trying to compare it to writing – better grammar, sentence structure, but to me they were incomparable. Perhaps I was also trying to better understand my late mother.

“I had a wonderful teacher years ago who would begin each day with a fresh piece of (very expensive!) water color paper and he’d just go.” Betsy had removed herself to a faraway place as she fondly recalled an act of learning.

“One day,” she continued, “it was a stream. He’d move some blue-green paint effortlessly across the paper. A gray tree would be added, then more trees. We’d all watch. It really was amazing see him work, Jack.”

I visualized the class huddled around the master’s easel and wondered how they learned whatever they were learning.

“In an hour or so he’d be done, she went on. We’d then spend the rest of the day at our easels painting our own streams while he walked around giving us individual pointers.”

“What might he say to you when it came to be your turn,” I asked? Betsy smiled. I wasn’t certain if she was nurturing a memory or patiently indulging my boundless curiosity. “Am I being a pest,” I continued? “You’ve got me going. I’m just really curious.”

“Not at all.” She laughed out loud. “Let’s see, what might he say?”

She thought for several seconds, took a sip of her drink, glanced at the desert menu, and returned her eyes to mine. “A rock looks different underwater than it does above the water. It’s a different color and the sunlight plays on it differently. The water has motion that both reflects and absorbs the light in different ways. Sometimes a stick will get stuck behind a rock. That changes everything. It’s so much about the light, Jack.”

The light.

Her words faded as her eyes lowered.

And so I paused this morning while crossing a wooden foot bridge and gazed at the brook below. I focused on a submerged rock. I watched the water slip over and around it while the sun twinkled and played on it through the trees. Betsy had reminded me that it was important for a painter to remember that the light always comes from the same direction.

To my eye, on that brook, this morning, there was nothing but light. There was even light in the absence of light. A thousand shades of light danced in every crevice and every corner.

It was blinding.

It was a moment.

I lingered until I felt that I could linger no longer and moved on.

Thank you, Betsy.

Thanks to the rest of you for visiting.

Jack