When I was around 5 or 6, my mom worked full time as a lab technician at a nearby hospital, and my dad, a college professor, taught several days a week. So various housekeepers “looked after” me and my brother when we got home from school, meaning they made sure we didn’t burn the house down or sustain any physical harm requiring more than a Band-Aid. But in the evening, if my parents went out, we sometimes had a baby sitter, a young woman from the neighborhood—I think her name was Marie—who was happy to engage on a more meaningful level.
I’m not sure if I’d already been drawing, or if that was her idea. But I remember we were sitting on the dining room carpet with a pad of paper and my Crayola pack of 64, and that she said, if I wanted her to, she could show me how to draw snow.
I was not big on sharing my art supplies. But she was careful to only direct, having me begin by drawing a tree with some fairly horizontal branches, and then top those branches with a waxy line of white. This was fine but didn’t seem like much of a trick or anything special, and though I might know the snow was there, as she pointed out, you couldn’t really see it against the white of the page. But I could feel her excitement as she went on to describe the way snow might catch the reflection of the sky, especially at dusk. So she had me take the palest blue crayon and add a thin line just above the white.
This still seems miraculous to me: such a simple yet beautiful thing. A moment whose Fauve-like influence went on to steer not only my taste, but also so much of my life’s direction. The imperative, in whatever medium or style, to reflect what I see.
That the snow is reflecting the sky! I love that! And the idea that Marie wanted to teach a child that this very subtle thing could be communicated in a drawing!
Sweet!