Painting as a Spiritual Practice
Guest Writer: Ken Fellow
A Graceful Penumbra or Shadow
A Graceful Penumbra
Someone painting a house … not usually a subject to capture in watercolor. Walking past this scene in Stonington, Maine, I was attracted by the painter on his ladder … riveted less by the man than by his graceful, dramatic shadow. How remarkable that an ordinary human, doing such everyday work, could cast a near balletic penumbra. On reflection, this seemed a dramatic physical representation of the concept, existing in both spiritual and psychological literature, that human personalities have both a consciousness and a latent shadow side.
Painting in watercolors for many years now and incorporating shadows in my work has always been intentional and personally rewarding. Shadows create and denote light in a picture. Without them, there is only color to build interest in the subject or scene. Shadows in paintings can be any color. Art classes often teach they should be the complementary color of the object they cover …. that is the ‘painterly’ way. Most people think of shadows as black or grey, but in fact, scientists say they are variations of blue. Whatever hue an artist chooses, shadows’ have highly variable shapes and sizes, edges both faint and sharp, and a random distribution in any scene that attracts and intensifies interest.
Painting shadows in watercolor can be somewhat of a high-wire act. Because watercolor is a light-to-dark, transparent medium, the lightest colors must be painted first. Unlike oils, if a color is painted that’s too dark, it can’t be rectified by covering it with a lighter color. As a result, the shadows in a watercolor painting are usually the last step … to be laid down over the lighter colors in a scene. A lot can go wrong: shadow washes too dark, misplaced, or unrealistic ….and the painting is ruined and can’t be corrected.
In my pre-teens, long ago and way before TV, I listened daily to radio dramas.
One of my favorites was THE SHADOW …, a mystery program always begun with a
deep, ominous voice asking: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” Since those days, shadiness has always been intriguing to me. Later in life, my profession as a radiologist also may have been an influence. A former medical colleague at an art showing remarked: “Well, I see you’re still dealing in shadows.”
For some, shadows exist as a dark side of human personalities. The psychologist Carl Jung has written that “everyone carries a shadow,” and “the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”
The spiritual teacher, Patricia Adams Farmer, supports the concept of the need to attend to one’s shadow side with “compassionate self-awareness.” She further advises: “Our shadow side is part of our humanity, albeit the more primitive, unpleasant, and difficult side. With courage, we can look deeply into the dark side of our being –not to judge and condemn –but to understand, to suffer with, and to love back into the wide, rich tapestry of our being.”
My favorite painting teacher, Dewitt Hardy, taught that artists “are in the business of making miracles.” For me, my watercolor efforts have no chance for such an aspiration without effective shadows.
Ken Fellows
Joanna https://www.joannaseibert.com/