BY Harry Weekes
In watercolor painting, the paper is the painter’s most powerful asset. I should pause right here to say, “a good painter.” For us novices, the paper is the tool we use most clumsily, so let’s focus on the aspiration.
Really good painters use the white of the paper strategically, appreciating all the ways it informs what they are hoping to capture and the story they are trying to tell. Layering paint onto the white creates a thousand variations of subtle transitions. Leave the white alone and paint the space around it, and an image becomes electric, jumping off the plane of the paper. Whatever techniques the painters employ, they still work with the challenge of a static space where they strive to create movement across what is, ultimately, a flat landscape.
Most of the time that we go to Idaho Falls, it’s early. We are invariably headed southeast to make some hockey deadline, and the trip down Gannett Road, then connecting to Highway 20 outside of Picabo, is a turn into the rising sun. The shadows play across that eastern edge of the Camas Prairie in all the ways that make a subtle landscape come to life.
It is rare that I ever make this drive in the afternoon.
So it was that on the last weekend of February, we hit Highway 20 and turned left some time after 4 p.m.
Morning light intensifies. The heavy orange and yellows of sunrise slowly fade and leave behind the brightness of the day. In the winter, this light looks yellowish to me, subtly coming out of a blanket of blue.
In the afternoon, on this afternoon, with the clouds, with the snow, with it getting closer to spring, with the sun gradually dropping to the west, what emerged was a rich and deep purple. Heading towards Picabo at this time, with the shadows playing in the clouds and deepening in the folds of the hills, is to drive through a wonder of light.
Now, cut in the swans.
On our left, a pair of Trumpeter swans glides over the fields playing with your perception simply by moving in and out of a thousand kinds of white. They are as much ghosts as they are real — impressions of birds moving across the sky.
On our left, another pair are in the perfect space, their flight pattern straight across rapidly darkening blue/purple/shadow hills, even as the sun seems to hit them like a spotlight. They could not be glowing more.
The pairs of swans are like counterpoints on either side of the car, their impact somehow amplified by the fact that I cannot see both images at once. I have to look left, adjust to the washed-out sky and find the pair thumping west in a world where it is hard to distinguish boundaries. Then I look right, where two beacons of light, perfectly contained in the images of swans, head out over Silver Creek.
The poet William Carlos Williams talked about white chickens and red wheelbarrows; his skill to paint an image in few words on the canvas of paper.
Neither poet nor painter, I simply wanted to record this observation of Trumpeter swans. The natural world. Just a few seconds. A moment, really. On a Friday afternoon in February, headed to Idaho Falls, on Highway 20 outside of Picabo.
Harry Weekes is the founder and head of school at The Sage School in Hailey. This is his 50th year in the Wood River Valley, where he lives with Hilary and one of their three baby adults—Simon. The other members of the flock, Georgia and Penelope, are currently fledging at Davidson College in North Carolina and Middlebury College in Vermont.