Learning to paint has interesting parallels with learning to observe movement. These similarities are fascinating in themselves. For me, however, the greatest reward of learning to paint is the way it enriches my visual experience of the world.
Colorado can be very sere in the winter, when the leaves fall and the fields turn a dusty brown. Fortunately, we enjoy many sunny days. And when light touches the trees, the branches glow orange or pale lavender. Some shrubs appear to be magenta; some grasses, pale yellow. And in the morning, when the sun is coming up, the distant foothills turn pink for a moment, and then apricot.
Transcending color constancy awakens my awareness of how even nondescript objects become beautiful in the right light. What was once dull and static comes to life.
Henri Bergson, the great French philosopher of time and motion, said much the same thing about seeing movement. According to Bergson, we tend to think about movement as a series of static positions, which form “a line in time.” Yet any real movement is “an indivisible change.”
Bergson assures us that when we come to appreciate movement as a continuous process of change, reality “affirms itself dynamically… What was immobile and frozen in our perception is warmed and set in motion. Everything comes to life around us, everything is revivified in us.”