Shedding Light
Dusk Series, "Striped Triptych," 2015. We say that dusk “falls,” but on the Nova Scotia seaboard, gazing at the sea and a far horizon, dusk appears to sweep horizontally across water and sky. In fact there seem to be multiple horizons of many shades, drawing our eyes into a liminal palette of uncertainty and invention. Sea, sky, and imagination fuse into inseparable suggestion. It was late afternoon in late September and the leaves were just the expectant side of peak. Colors of flames and embers; long late-day shadows already pooling into pockets of deeper darkness. The woods of suggestion, metaphor, and fairytales, just beyond my studio door—always infuriatingly out of focus.
This was several years ago, before the pandemic transformed life as we know it, and I was staying at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. I was there to write, and write I did, dutifully, all day long. But just before dusk I’d begin to act like my dog when she had to go out. I’d squirm, get up, and pace, eyes wild, needing to do something that my brain couldn’t quite identify. This happened every day, and yet it always snuck up on me.
I needed air, motion, to stop thinking, to start walking, to start looking. Before I burst out of my studio and into the deep woods, I’d grab a jacket and my camera. And then I was free to walk the Colony’s network of dirt roads till a big cowbell called me to dinner.
I felt exceptionally lucky. I was in rural, northern New England at peak “leaf peeping” season, and the reds, yellows, and blazing, glowing-ember oranges of
