Seeking The Light

It's the light I'm noticing these first days of spring. Light, never exactly the same from one moment to the next.

It's the way artists imagined and mirrored the light that struck me in a visit to the art gallery in St. Louis. I've come to leave all expectations behind when I step through the doors of these places, these carefully-curated spaces where human genius is on display. The acres of space, divided into vast rooms, the sticky tape on wooden floors warning us to stay back from the pictures, the works of art, hung at eye level on walls painted in muted colors. Lighting, the manmade kind, illuminating even the softest brush strokes.

Often in a stop along the way - as it was this time - I step back and allow myself to be surprised, delighted, stirred, troubled. Emotions in this human drawn from another - an artist who stared at a blank canvas and began.

Edward Mitchell Bannister
Woman Standing Near A Pond 1880
An African American, Bannister stated the
discrimination he experienced multiplied his
artistic struggles tenfold 

Paul Conoyer
The Plaza After The Rain - 1908

It was the light that captured me this time - from a dreamy cityscape, to the bucolic, to the gritty factory, the artist finding the light even in darkness. 

And so, back home in cold, drab brown northern Pennsylvania, I'm watching for the light all around me these days. Yesterday the morning's sunrise caught a trail left behind by a lone jet, carrying its load, humans, parcels, luggage – things moving from here to there.

Yesterday in the warmth of a day with sunshine, I needed the woods, the bare trees and ground flattened by melted snow. Spring. Carrying with me the artists' expressions of their worlds - my world. Seeing, observing bird song, puddles with globules of glistening amphibian eggs, a chorus of frogs and spring peepers, stilling as I passed by ... and the light.