Spring Rhythm

Margaret Mair, Dancer in Green, Original Art

My dancer makes me think of the world in spring. She radiates restless energy, attention turned inward, dancing to a rhythm only she can hear. And she’s clothed in green, like the new-grown leaves that promise deeper greens to come.

Spring has been a long time coming this year – cold winds, falling snowflakes, icy hail have all conspired to keep it at bay. As March turned into April those winter friends did not linger long when they came – but they refused to stay away, bracketing each promise of warmer days with their cold storminess. We might declare that is was time for Spring to be here, but they did not agree.

But now they have retreated. Spring is actually here. There’s green grass and the promise of leaves on the trees. There are buds and birds and warming temperatures that bring the hardy (or foolhardy) out in shorts and shirts. The sun shines differently though my window as it comes closer to our northern climes, lingering longer each day and angling its beams towards where my plants sit, waiting. Like me, they are hungry for its light.

And then there’s the feel of things, a kind of restless excitement that tingles the body and wakes the imagination. There’s a sense of good things coming. As day follows night and happiness follows sorrow so spring follows winter, and after the dark days we are glad again. It’s the rhythm of being, the dance of life.

As my dancer in green reminds me.

Notes: On Color in Spring

Margaret Mair, Flowers in the Sunset, Original Art

Seasons are not the same everywhere.

I grew up in a place without Spring – or winter. The closest thing to spring was the coming of the May rainy season, when grass grew greener and the poui trees lost their leaves and burst into flower for a short while; when, if all went well, the reservoirs filled; when the sweet sop was ripening and we looked forward to buying bunches of guineps from roadside stalls.

So when I moved to this northern place both spring and winter were a revelation, strange and cold and beautiful.

My first real winter was an adventure in learning about cold and snow and the shortness of days and the slipperiness of ice underfoot. Unaccustomed to months of short days and much time spent indoors, to rising to dark mornings, and nights that fell before the day’s activities were done, I welcomed my first Spring with joy and appreciation. There was a sense that life was expanding again, and we would enjoy the return of green and sun and warmth.

I remember sitting outside on damp, green grass with my books, “studying”, enjoying being in the barely-warm sun with my friends. It was time to breathe deeply and stretch out again, to shed coats and boots and dream of summer clothes and sandals. We were re-emerging from the clutch of winter and the depths of indoor life to the freshness, openness and changing colors of outdoors.

It took me a while to be aware of the many different colors of spring. The yellow-greens and deep reds of buds, the browns and greens of new branches, the deeper brown of mud, the gritty grey and lacey black of disappearing, smutty roadside snow. The coy blues of the periwinkles, the fragrant purple of the lilacs, the sunny yellows of the forsythia and the dandelions. The evergreens seemed a softer green. When the spring rains came they washed the air clean and made the new leaves shine.

And when the sun went down it added its sunset colors to the colors of the day.

The Joys of Spring…

René Lelong, Joys of Spring

What are the joys of spring? For most of us, the promise of the approaching summer’s warmth and sun and fruitfulness. Trees blossom again, flowers bloom. We shed our winter clothes and spend time outside, enjoying the sunlight and the fresh air. It is a beautiful time; it is a changeable time.

Sun encourages, rain waters, wind tosses, cold pinches. We hope that the new buds will grow, become leaves, that blossoms will become fruit, that courting birds and animals will find safe shelter to raise their young. But the buds and flowers are still fragile, and a change of weather, a change of temper, can destroy the promise that spring brings.

We see that sense of eagerness and that fragility in this painting. The two slim young women and the eager girl enjoy and embody the joys of a windy spring day. Skirts and scarf are blowing in the wind; the sea behind them is kissed with the whiteness of wind-driven breaking waves; the grasses bend before the gusts.

Each has their own look, their own character, but they are all moving forward together, against the wind. The red-haired young woman is leaning and moving forward and yet turns, attentive, toward the other two. The dark-haired woman is poised, erect, looking down smilingly at the young girl beside her, one hand raised to her windblown hair. The young girl looks as if she is laughing, leaping (springing?) forward between the two women, her movement supported by their hands. They hold her safe between them; she unites them.

Whites and pale colors light up the painting – the whites in blossoms, dresses, shoes, flowers in the grass, all touched gently with pinks and blues. Spring green touches the land behind them and hides among the darker greens of the patch they are passing through. It is warm enough for them to wear only short sleeved jackets or a scarf over their dresses. The young girl’s legs are bare, she wears a white flower in her hair, her short sleeved red jacket adds a touch of bright color. The dark haired woman’s jacket adds a subtler touch.

Even the sky is touched with white, full of clouds. Sky and sea hint at turbulence, a changeability like the changeable weather of Spring. In contrast, the rock behind the three looks both immovable and worn, dark in the shadow, sunlit where it frames the sea. Its shadows give us a quieter space to rest our eyes on.

At first glance it looks simple, like an illustration. And the artist, René Lelong, was well-known and highly respected for his work as an illustrator and his knowledge of that art. But he was also known for his work as a painter, and was a member of the Salon des Artistes Francais.

So it’s not surprising that a second glance tells us there is more to see. We look again because those figures moving forward are intriguing. They seem to be coming toward us, calling for our attention, inviting us to look around them.

We see in them the joys, the eagerness and the fragility that are a part of spring.

The Fertility of Spring

Jozsef Rippl-Ronai, Spring

Spring is tantalizing. It teases us with its suggestion of all that is to come. Trees are budding, crops being planted, trees and grasses showing their spring greens, early flowers lend a touch of color. But it is only a beginning – a fertile beginning.

In the same way this painting is a suggestion of spring, a sketch really, a promise. The yellow-greens of meadow and tree leaves are spring colors. The lights and darks of freshly turned soil, waiting for planting, are other signs of spring. The red hues of earth in the background suggest fertile, waiting soil.

Nothing looks complete. The trees and houses are blocks of colour – our mind completes them. The roofs in the distance are red, echoing the roughly blocked in colors of the soil. Those hues are picked up again in the glimpse of sky at the top of the painting, in areas of the trees in the background.

The figure in the foreground catches our eye – he is outlined darkly, filled in simply, his shadow lying across the ground behind him. He is working along lines of tilled soil. It looks as if he is hoeing a field, getting it ready for planting.

Behind him trees rise vertically, crossing the horizontal lines of fields and low hills. Only the man and the tree beside him curve away from those lines, each leaning toward the other, and his shadow breaks the ploughed line running across behind him. The trees lend their roundness to the painting, their leaves and branches barely suggested within the shape of each tree.

The painter was Joszef Rippl-Ronai, a Hungarian artist who studied art in Munich and Paris, where he came to know and appreciate other artists working in various styles. His fertile mind was influenced by the naturalistic tradition of Munich, then by the Impressionists in Paris. When he returned to his own country he developed his own style, loose and full of light, very different from that traditionally accepted by his countrymen.

Change is not easy, and new approaches are not always welcomed. At first his work and ideas were not readily accepted.  It took time for them to be appreciated and enjoyed, and then he found himself at the forefront of artistic change in Hungary.

This painting gives you an idea of how he worked. Rather than tell the viewers what to see, it invites them to complete the picture in their own minds. And yet there is a formality to its lines and composition.

Like Spring, it teases and is fertile – fertile ground for the imagination.

Spring and the Passing of Time

Leon Wyczolkowski, Spring

Spring is more than a season; it’s a marker of time passing.

In this picture Spring is blowing in through the open window, an onrush of light and wind into the darker room.  The curtains billow, the book’s page blows up – it looks as if someone was just sitting in the chair, has just moved away.  The foliage of the tree outside gleams with the same light that falls on and outlines the chair.  That light also falls on the windows and over the window sill and spills down the wall.  The windows reflect the scene outside, bringing it inside.

The painting is of Spring seen through the window in the artist’s studio.  The artist is Leon Wyczolkowski, a distinguished and prolific Polish artist, graphic artist, illustrator and teacher.  He was someone who explored and was influenced by different techniques and styles as he developed his own. This painting was created toward the end of his life.

In it the techniques and knowledge he developed allow him to share with us a mature view of Spring.  Here it is a light-filled, turbulent, restless season that speaks to the artist’s soul.  In it we see the artist’s world opening up to nature’s winds and colours and changing light. And yet there is that empty chair.  It speaks to me of both welcome and regret.

Welcome for the new season; regret for the passing of time, looking ahead to the time the artist will no longer sit in that chair and look out.

Seeing Spring Softly

Alfred Sisley, Small Meadows in Spring

It’s a blue sky with powder puff clouds, reflected in the river running by.  Some of the trees are in leaf, some in bud, some in bloom.  The grass is spring green.  A few people are enjoying the spring day – they look almost like part of the landscape, except for the woman, head down, coming toward us.

Alfred Sisley loved painting landscapes. He painted the textures of clouds in the skies, the shimmer of light on water, the shapes of trees, the bulk of buildings and the changing colours of the weather and the seasons.  To look at his work is to see the beauty of all these things, and to see the care and love with which he observed the world around him.

What we don’t see is that  Alfred Sisley was one of those people who never quite fit.  He was an Englishman who was born in France and lived there all his life, yet never officially became a French national.  His paintings were not quite conventional for his times, not quite impressionistic. His work was accepted by the official Salon, and he exhibited with the Impressionists who had been rejected by the Salon. Born into a prosperous family, he found himself living in poverty after his father’s business failed.  Although he spent his life working as an artist, his paintings only began to sell later in his life and never sold for as much as the work of his contemporaries.

Yet he kept on painting and observing.  He saw his purpose as giving life to the art he created, using color, form and surface, and through everything that happened to him he held fast to that purpose.  We are the beneficiaries – he left us many beautiful paintings to enjoy, including this image of a soft Spring day.

The Beauty of Spring

Alfons Mucha, Spring (1896)

A beautiful young woman stands, delicately clothed, almost interwoven into the trees and flowers behind her.  She holds a musical instrument, a delicately bent twig strung like a harp; birds linger on it, ready to sing.  Her face looks both radiant and intent on the music she is playing.  Her long hair drifts around her, its shade echoed in the trees behind.  Her gown is both caught up in a branch beside her and underfoot.  Everything is woven together; the curve of her instrument carries into the curve of the hip it rests against; the swirl of her sleeve is echoed in the swirl of her hair.  The flowers in her hair look like the flowers in the trees behind.

The artist who created her is Alfons Mucha.  His rise to popularity began when, finding himself in the right place at the right time, he was given the opportunity to create a poster for Sarah Bernhardt’s appearance in Gismonda.  The poster he produced was so different from other posters at the time that it attracted immediate attention.  Bernhardt loved it and gave him a contract to work with her.  This established his reputation, though it was the work he did after that maintained it.

He created the image above, Spring, for a series of four panneaux or art posters depicting the seasons.  You can see echoes of the posters he created for Bernhardt in the way it focuses on the young woman and makes her the center of the picture.  You can see the influence of the folk art he grew up with, full of curving lines and beautiful patterns.  You can see the influence of nature in the curving lines of trees and flowers.  You can see his desire to create something beautiful for others.

As he brought together his ideas about art with the skills, ideas and knowledge he had developed, Mucha did not so much set out to change or challenge the practice of art as to follow his own vision.  He began as a young man from the small town of Ivancice in what is now the Czech Republic.  Then he became part of something much bigger.  He became part of the change that was sweeping through French art, the movement that became known as Art Nouveau.

His vision matched the times.  He created beautiful images for a world hungry for beauty, many of them in formats that could be shared widely.  And now, in a world still hungry for beauty, we can share them too.

To learn more about the Alfons Mucha, visit the Mucha Foundation.