Nancy Princenthal
Aha!
The play of light alone in space, of light on water, of placing one color beside another, thereby changing both: these are some of painting’s moves. Others involve the establishment of boundaries, ridges and declivities. Here, a swoop of tart green upstages a gray arch that hunches its shoulders behind. A gentle hill, rosy but unlit, snuggles up below. Beneath that, a color with no name. All are laid down across patches of applied paper. A game is afoot.
We writers have been invited to play, too—to indulge ourselves. The license is irresistible.
Alas (is it me? the times we live in?) a ditch—a stumbling block—is what comes first to mind. Specifically, the ha-ha—a term of landscape design I’ve long been tickled by and which I discover (via the UK National Trust website) comes from the ah! ah! That is, a pair of perfectly mismatched languages mirroring each other. A narrow dry trough, walled on at least one side, the ha-ha is a feature of some traditional English gardens; it is meant to create the illusion, for leisurely strollers, of unbroken expanse while making sure the livestock (decorative, one supposes) don’t wander. A ha-ha finds British laughter in this sleight of hand, a tight happy snort of discovery. Behind it, quietly, is the exhaled ah! of pure Gallic delectation. Let’s just lie down right here.
Landscape is a fiction, a place we create to revel in the world’s beauty, to confine and preserve it. It is born in nostalgia for a lost wonder—the wilderness—that became visible only in retrospect, after it had been tamed. In a word, landscape was born as image.
Yet the reverse is also true. Painting—whatever the subject—makes space, makes sense, sensation. It can create bounded forms that open, suddenly, onto previously unseen dimensions. It offers a place to sequester sunlight, the source of all color, an immeasurable and essentially unverifiable quality, irreducibly personal and incommunicable. An inside joke, color is a secret code, spoken by one. Also, a universal language, speaking for infinity.