Let There be Light

Above my desk is a photo of the library windows at my alma mater, Mt. Holyoke College. The windows are beautiful, mullioned and multi-paned, with cinquefoil arches and wrought iron devices. Looking at the picture, I remember the many hours I spent in that library, occasionally pausing to lift my eyes from the books and gaze out at the sky.





Before college, I lived in a Saranac Lake cure cottage. Built in the 1920s, that house has two cure porches featuring tall, generous windows designed to let in as much fresh air as possible for the aid of diseased lungs. They, too, are multi-paned, but of a simpler design. The solid wood casings and brass hinges leave no doubt of their functional purpose.



Windows have long indicated privilege; there was even a time in Great Britain when windows were taxed.





Through history, a desire for more and better windows has often been the catalyst of advances in architectural engineering. Humans, though compelled by our fur-less bodies to dwell within shelters, seem to covet openings in our walls.





Why?





Light. In early medieval Europe, craving for light became an international obsession. To the medieval mind, as Otto von Simson observes, "matter is aesthetically real only insofar as it partakes of, and is defined by, the luminous quality of light." (The Gothic Cathedral, p. 4).





Claude Monet probably wouldn't have used those words, but that was his impetus too. The movement he helped pioneer, Impressionism, was based on the mystery of light: he did not seek to paint things per se, but rather, the light which enables us to see.







Throughout time, religions and philosophies have equated light with life and goodness, and dark with death and evil. To ancient Greeks, for example, winter was the mourning time of Demeter, goddess of the harvest, while her daughter Persephone dwelt in the darkness of the underworld.







Now, as we have shifted our modern routine out of "daylight savings time", we are bracing ourselves for the descent of darkness which heralds the true onset of winter. Cold, sleet, snow, ice: these things are wintry, true enough; but darkness cannot be scraped or shoveled away.







Brief and weak as our North Country winter sunshine can be, we hunger for it. At my college library, the window seats were highly coveted by any who studied during daylight hours. And in my cure cottage home, cold never kept us from painting on the porches during winter afternoons whenever possible.






Don't let the cold stop you in your art, either: take advantage of such light as we have, and be glad of windows.




Labels: Claude Monet, cure cottage, Demeter, Gothic architecture, Mt. Holyoke College, Otto von Simson, Persephone