Seeing something special in nature requires acknowledging the power of contrast. Something unusual leaps suddenly and without warning from the landscape, or upon closer scrutiny, a particularly interesting surface or shape takes form that stands out from everything else around it. In such cases, nearby shapes and surfaces often provide a framework for the special object by fading somewhat into the background and giving it its proper due.
One of my favorite pastimes, particularly during late spring and early fall, is finding a spot deep in the greenery where the sunlight dominates. Everything else around it is in shadow or out of the light’s path, pulling the eye toward the bright center. Leaves, needles and boughs of other trees and shrubbery recede in importance and supply the window, if you will, to this innermost view. It’s like looking through a keyhole where the doorway itself doesn’t matter, but what I see beyond it can’t be measured, for whatever is visible to me is made all the more precious by virtue of what little bit of it is visible.
So much in nature exists in contrast, with the light once again playing a large role in how prominent some objects become in relationship to others. It’s not unlike the contrast setting on a photo editing program or an older analog TV set. The greater the contrast value, the more sharply the images stand out while less interesting surfaces and shapes fade into the background. Objects and shadows of objects aren’t nearly as interesting when all massed together. But the eye is a marvelous thing, in that, given enough time, it, too, adjusts its contrast setting to optimize whatever I happen to be viewing. For when I focus on an interesting surface, shape or texture, it becomes all that I see, and it takes patience and diligence to train the eye to be satisfied with one object at a time.
It also takes time and patience to develop an eye for the smaller, less noticeable things that don’t immediately jump out from the landscape. I took photos recently of the unopened buds on a maple tree branch that grows right past my window. A close look reveals small, reddish-brown sepals, or scale-like leaves, tightly closed around what will be either a flower or leaf once weather conditions are right for blooming. I also took photos of the clumps of snow that clung to that branch following the most recent storm, and could see the areas of blue ice within the soft folds of each cluster as well as how the light was refracted by the millions of ice crystals that, from a distance, look like nothing more than tufts of cotton clinging to a twig. Moss and lichen-encrusted rocks that move off into infinity along dirt roads, last year’s coffee-colored, dried oak leaves adorning a drab branch, and the gray-blue shadows of wizened pines across the snow ”“ all attest to the fact that, in nature, differences are celebrated.
Just the other day, I got yet another close-up shot of a blue jay as it knocked the snow aside with its beak to get at the birdseed. I was again able to see how intricate and delicate its feathers are, how they overlap, how their rich, turquoise color contrasts against the black and white ones that give the bird its distinctive and always breathtaking markings. I’ve often picked the tiniest of feathers off the porch floor and marveled at the complexity of their construction, of how each wee quill is actually a composite of smaller feathers all grouped along the bird’s body in such a way as to repel moisture and keep the creature warm.
The natural landscape is all about detail that defies being taken in at once. It is what makes nature the Great Teacher, supplying the impetus for taking time to see the finer points, the small attributes that, if taken collectively, set one thing apart from the other.
In art, detail is often dispensed with in favor of color, texture, outline and perspective. Stands of trees are, in these cases, nothing more than sweeps of whatever color values work together to complement each other and to produce what we see simply as green. It’s not that the artist is too lazy to put in the details, or is somehow not adept enough. It’s that he or she is challenging us to look for them, to force our mind’s eye to see what the artist saw but decided only to suggest. And indeed, those pines on the shore of the small island across the pond from my window do appear to be nothing more than a mass of solid color. But the longer I look, the more clearly I begin to see the light against dark, the wan gray branch against needled bough, and the pale pink haze of a deciduous tree that is close to blooming.
As in so many other aspects of this drama we call life, it’s all part of the process. For no one thing is able to exist without the other, and not only in a basic biological sense but in a visual one as well.
— Rachel Lovejoy, a freelance writer living in Lyman, who enjoys exploring the woods of southern Maine, can be reached via email at rachell1950@yahoo.com.
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