I sit at the kitchen table surrounded by windows. Looking ahead to the East the new fallen fluffy snow lining my neighbor’s house is darker than the the breaking clouds in the sky. Looking then over my shoulder at the snow on Jackette ( my twisting bonsai Jack pine tree) which is brighter and lighter than the purply blue cast in the west. Values. This is a loaded word, a powerful word, a guiding light word. It is a word that is an underpinning to creations, or a life, becoming art.
In the creation of visual works, value, the changes from dark to light, makes the rhythm. Dark reveals form by contrasting with lights which together model structures for us to see. It is the subtle gradations of shifting values that mold and shape on a two dimensional plane. This is physics. This is science. Values help us understand our physical world so we can depict it. Just as values in our life create a foundation upon which to build our choices.
I remember years ago trying to paint the snowy winter day when the blue grey clouds shift and role behind trees’ snow lined limbs that swung in a northern wind. Oh but that piece was a bad.. bad, bad, bad rendition! (I still have it and look at it and smile at my younger self!) I did not fully ‘know’ my values. I had not yet with true scholarly and spiritual deliberation considered the nuanced shifts that I needed to understand in order to do justice to the feel of the scene. Changes from one shape to the next were executed in crude, broad sweeping changes - a black and white approach if you will. This is dark blue and this is stark white. I created a this is right and this is wrong framing of a snow mound, a perception, an idea.
When you take up your pencil or your paint or your pen relish the chance to explore a full range of values 10 or 20 or more! It is a meditative practice if nothing else! And if visual depiction is not your passion, look around and indulge yourself in the identification game of how many shifts of light and dark can you see!
PS I first began this journey of exploration when I read that in a sumi - e painting, the artist strives for at least 5 values often in one brush stroke!
PPS Take a walk at night and if you can in the snow, what is the lightest object? What is the darkest?
PPPS Which is lighter - the road breaching a hill with the sun on high or the side of a white house in the shade?