Classical Insights

"Painting in Winter"

Written by Ken Alexander, the winner of our June 2023 Father's Day Poetry Contest. I remember how we struggled upthe logging trail like pack mules in tandem,the air so clear and cold the condensationin our nostrils crystalized as wesucked breath, but still, so that we didn’t feelthe cold. The track climbed steep where other sons—another generation—snaked oak logsdown the mountain leaving only stumpsthat squatted in the snow between the treeslike hooded dwarves or cowled monks in prayer.Dad kept saying, “Just a little higherto where we see the light that floods the gorge.”“It’s all about the light,” he said as westood to our shins in snow at easels he hadmade from broom sticks, “See the black spearsof spruce against the snow field? Paint them like Godcut them with a cold chisel and make the snowbehind them sing like angels in the sun.You have to show them or they won’t believe.They said photography would put an end topainting while it captures light waves in a boxand puts them down on paper to recordreality precisely like no painter can.But they were wrong. A painter goes beyondreality behind it, changes it,transforms the light inside his head to substance.”And as he spoke he jabbed the frigid air,his sable brush a sword against the darkor a baton conducting light waves intosymphonies that played upon his easel—while fire began to burn inside my bootsand gloves, as cold seeped through the insulationuntil I thought I’d die, a sacrificeto art.Today in searching for a scrap of historyI’d misplaced, I rifled through a boxunopened now for thirty years. Surprised,I found our watercolors tucked insidea folder labelled in my father’s hand—the crude attempts of amateurs, not brilliant.I noticed frost fronds fixed into the paintwhere the wash froze before it dried that winterday when I was twelve and followed fatherup a mountain—a bundle of sticks on my back—to learn about the light inside his brain.And I remember what I lost. What I forgot. Could you be our next contest winner? Click here to enter now!