THE ARTIST WHO WANTED TO PAINT LIGHT

The day Natasha wrapped her chubby fingers around a washable crayon and made a picture of her mommy and daddy her destiny was established. She was going to be an artist. "Natasha could draw before she could write," bragged her mother. And draw Natasha did, from the roses in her mothers garden to the little blue bird that splashed in the birdbath in the yard. She drew blooming trees and the blue-green grass of the local golf course. Her pictures were always up on the classroom bulletin board and year after year they won prizes in the local art exhibition.

Natasha was proficient with pen and pencil, inks, pastels and acrylics by the time she was 15. However, watercolor was her favourite medium. She loved their luminosity, their transparent glow and the way they captured light. As time went by Natasha abandoned her charcoals, her pen and ink sketches and her massive acrylic canvases. She became obsessed with water-colors, painting the same scene over and over again, trying to capture the morning light just after sunrise or the look of a fresh washed sky after a rain storm.

Natasha was so entranced by the sheer splendor of a cloudscape, or a rainbow; she would lose track of where she was or whom she was talking to. Once she fell down a steep hillside, spraining her ankle and twisting her wrist because she was too busy watching the sunset to pay attention to the terrain. This little incident encouraged her to avoid walking when she was looking at the sky or anything in it.

However, no matter how hard she tried, Natasha never quite captured the light she longed to portray. The harder she tried to emulate the crisp, clean, luminosity of the sky or the magical splash of reflected light in her seascapes, the duller and flatter her pictures became. Finally, Natasha put her brushes away and dropped out of the fine Arts program in school.

For several years, Natasha, mopped around home keeping the curtains closed, never looking at a sunset or for a rainbow. Eventually, she enrolled in business school and seemed well on her way to a career in the world of business machines and merchandising. However, fate doesn't let go of its prospective candidates easily, especially those who are summoned to the vocation of an artist.

One day Natasha had an accident. While walking across the street, her eyes carefully averted from the cloud filled sky, a car ran the red lights and knocked her out of the crosswalk. Her head hit the curb and she lost consciousness for 12 hours. When Natasha woke up, her head was swathed in bandages and the room was dark .

" Please turn the lights on. "She said, but nobody paid attention. She knew someone was in the room because she could hear people coming in and out and once she heard a doctor saying, "Her vital signs are stable but only time will tell if she will wake up."

"You idiot " she told him, "I am awake! Why wouldn't you listen to me?" However, he left the room and once again she was enveloped by the silent darkness.

As the hours or days passed , Natasha s restless mind started drawing pictures; pictures like the ones she did as a toddler, pictures of fat, purple cats, green dogs and bright yellow suns. She drew pictures of her pretty, young mother, and tall, bearded father. She drew her classmates, her brother and sister and the mini-scooter she rode to school on. Her head was full of pictures: seascapes, portraits, landscapes, forests and rocky beaches. Finally with a brilliant burst of light, a scene of awful clarity filled her mind.

It was the night sky, not as viewed from earth but from the dusty cloud filled void between the galaxies. Bodiless, she viewed a celestial being, a Goddess of the night, her hands emitting the clearest, most brilliant light she had ever imagined. It was as if every molecule, every particle was illuminated, and all the colors in creation shone forth from the blackness of space. "Now I see," she murmured to herself, and with that soft murmur she alerted the intensive care nurse and returned to the world of sight, sound, light and darkness.

In years to come, art critics might argue about the themes and techniques of Natasha's work, but the one thing they agreed on was the brilliance and luminosity of her light and dark colors.

by Elainna Crowell,

Footnote
Not all of us are summoned to the vocation of an artist. However, unless we want our lives to be flat and dull it is advisable to investigate the relation between light and darkness. As any art teacher would tell us, the quality of light in your creations is dependent on the quality of the darks you use.

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