The folio of prints lay in his lap as the Old Man turned its pages carefully, one at a time. He passed an image of a whitetail buck, tail flagged high, sailing over a ridgetop toward an unfocused nowhere, out of sight. He passed another of wood ducks on a pond, their images wavering atop water’s rippled mirror, like a looking glass begging a guess as to which, if either, is real. He paused on the next, a heron wading calm shallows. He paused, and then he stopped. He dropped the top right corner of the page and rested his hand back on the arm of the chair, tapped his fingers, his eyes never leaving the colored drawing. I critiqued the work over his shoulder.
“It’s not the best of them,” I said. “You can see the pencil marks where he sketched it out first, and the real herons we see look smoother and neater than that. And they’re a different shade of blue. In fact, all the colors are off.”
He continued to look at the drawing.
“The point of drawing anything in nature is to remember seeing it,” he said after a while. “If you’d never seen one, the drawing would just be of a bird in a pond. It wouldn’t mean anything to you. If you have seen one, then the color of the drawing is inconsequential. Maybe this one’s blue looks dull because the sky was overcast. Maybe the water is gray because it’s cold, and maybe the heron is cold, too. No, you’re seeing it wrong. It’s not supposed to look just like a heron you’d see. It’s supposed to look like everything you’d see along with the heron.”
He lost me there.
“Take wild turkeys, for example,” he said. “The next time you find yourself in front of a real turkey fan, look at all the different colors and think about the place the turkey came from.
“The dark browns look like the topsoil he walked on. The lighter colors are the hazy dusts of the late afternoon. The black bars look like the bark of the tree he roosted in.
“When the sun shines across his back, the iridescent rainbow that shimmers across looks like the transition time from night to day, 15 minutes of changing light on the surface of a single feather, and that feather repeated across the hundreds of transitions that bird had seen.
“When God makes artwork of the world He created, He captures the best of what he said was good in a representation for us to enjoy. When man makes artwork of the same, it’s to remember what he saw, and how he felt when he saw it, and who he was with and what they talked about, and all the things that went good and bad that day.
“Looking at this heron, I can feel the warmth in the summer sun, smell the heavy damp, see the minnows and perch in the shallow backwater, and feel the nylon trotline in my hand.”
“I just see a sketch of a heron,” I said.
“That,” he said, “is because you’re only looking.”
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