Remember the rules

Oh yeah, now I remember!
Almost 2 years ago I painted a picture of the ocean at dawn. I loved painting it, but I really didn’t love the painting. I loved the idea of the painting; I loved the resources I gathered for the painting. The painting just wasn’t right.
This was a dawn like none I’d seen. It was a cold grey dawn with a heavy sky and a nip in the air. It was also my first trip to the Outer Banks. We had arrived the day before and the ocean startled me. It wasn’t the size that surprised me, I expected big and endless and all that. The relentlessness, the roar, every cliché I’d ever heard or read about the ocean suddenly made sense. It was a powerful stimulating experience just to be there.
But this dawn was like none I’ve seen since. We waited: the 4 of us, cameras in hand. We took pictures of the water, the birds, the sand, each other, the waves, the seaweed, the shells. We waited.
The sun was slow getting up that morning. It was wrapped in thick, insulating, billowy clouds and we waited while it debated it’s appearance. Seagulls flew by in groups as did the pelicans. Busy little pipers ran just a wingtip away from drenching and scoured the sand as each wave covered and left it. A fine color seemed to be ready for our view and then sucked back in as though the sun had put forth a toe and decided to snuggle back in for the rest of the dream.
Just as it might seem that we’d stopped expecting the grandest dawn of our lifetime, a small hole in the cloud bank allowed the light to shoot through in sharp shafts. The sun had, unaware to us, climbed to a point where each break focused a beam of light on the waiting world. Our hands clicked the camera shutters again and again midst cries and squeals and exclamations as the suns rays danced one direction and another and another revealing this color and that. Writing about it, I still feel the surge of the moment.
When the two film users got their results, the four cameras gave an awe-inspiring account of the reward of our early rising endurance.
My daughter shared one she was particularly fond of and it became the inspiration for my painting. I amassed the best photos from the moment for resource. I felt every sun ray and every wave. I heard the roar while I painted. I felt every fiber of me energized. It was the ultimate experience, but it wasn’t the ultimate painting. I know that photos aren’t paintings and paintings aren’t photos. That wasn’t the problem with this painting. It had a beautiful awesome sky and powerful, rolling waves with light sparkles in all the right places. I reviewed my sources again and again.
The primary resource for the light was a stunning picture in which the precise configuration of the clouds at that moment fashioned a heart shaped corona with a white dove at the center. I was amazed and decided to honor that symbolism. A friend felt it looked a little schmaltzy so I tried to soften the surge of symbolism. But that didn’t really fix what was wrong with the painting. Then I got the darkness too bright, not too light, but too bright. I worked and reworked. At last I sat the picture aside, painted another of a long look down the shore and another of the Hatteras Light through sea grass and allowed the disappointment no more than a nag now and then.
One night in a worship service, I took my small sketch pad and my colored pencils and scratched out my memory of the light. There in that moment I wrote: It’s all about the light. Of course I found moving internal applications to that experience and have written them up in their own blog. Yet the statement has always pulled at me.
A few weeks ago I just knew. I felt foolish. How could I have missed that. As a teacher, I’m strong on academic knowledge. It’s the foundation we must build creative thought on. You learn how to do; then you learn to create. You learn the rules; then you learn to break them, if necessary, to stay true to the work. But you always respect the rules. My painting had broken one of the first rules. There was no subject. With a handful of gorgeous resources I had stumbled ignorantly. In my desire to represent it all, to live it all again, I walked all over the canvas with no intent, no purpose, no subject.
So today, I pulled it out and took out the payne’s grey and ultramarine, served myself a good dish of medium and pulled the clouds and waves into subordination to the light. Amazed, I survey it now. It has unity, it has purpose. It was all about the light. It was all about the rules.