THE COLOR OF AIR

The image at the left is called Sonoma County Evening. It is imaginary, and yet it looks like most of the fall evenings in Sonoma County. After standing outdoors and painting many sketches of an area outside of Penngrove, I put my memories of those evenings painting into one picture. It is what I love about being able to create your own memory on paper.

The air in Sonoma County is always full of color. There are crystals of fog that collect the sunlight and crystals of condensation that paint the sky in the evening as the moisture in the fall rises from the ground. The sky becomes a canvas that is the beginning of the story of that time and that place. In some places a yellow sky means smog, in others, it means a sunset, but the color of the air around us always tells a story. And in a painting, smog and fog can both be beautiful. And the color of the air affects the colors of everything between us and the objects in the distance that we gaze at. I have had the same painting mentor for 5 years and she always says, "don't do anymore to the forground till you get the sky in." A yellow sky goes in and all of the colors in the hills need some yellow in them. A sky of light value makes the foreground darker. A sky of warmth needs to sparkle off of the objects in the picture.

In writing I think the sky becomes the setting, the culture, the time and the place. All of these things sit comfortably in the background so that the story itself stands out. In the foreground we avoid telling a story that doesn't match the background. In the painting above, I could not put smoke rising from the chimney. But even though that is a lovely thought, this is a warm evening, late in the summer and smoke from the chimneys would automatically place your eye on the buildings. Then I would have to add more detail to make that story make sense and pretty soon the peacefulness that I felt when I started the picture, the feeling of gazing at a sky full of color that paints the hills, would be lost.

How do I know? Because I have two drawers full of manuscripts that are overtold and need to be edited, two drawers of stories where the culture, the rhyme, the folklore template stood out as the main story and not as the underpainting and the background. They are pieces of work that I allowed to spin away from the story in order to keep a pet phrase or paragraph in tact. And for every painting like the one above, for every illustration in a book, I have ten that did not capture the essence of what I went after. But they did help me get to where I wanted to go.

So what is the color of air? Let me know what a yellow sky means to you, or a green sky, or a red sky. I'd like to know.