Light From the Antipodes
Why North American oil paintings make me homesick
A few years ago, a painting in the traveling Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Auckland Art Gallery — Toi o Tāmaki made me unexpectedly homesick. I don’t remember its name, but it was a Mexican landscape that featured the burnt siennas, adobe yellows, ochres, and ceramic reds endemic to my time in Texas. The pigments were made from materials gathered from Mexican land and seeing those colors, which don’t naturally occur in Aotearoa, made me suddenly and violently lonely. Knowing the ochre for the paint came from North American soil made me want to touch it and transport myself back to the West Texas desert for a moment.
It made me think about how light and color are different in Aotearoa New Zealand, and about how oil paint captures that in a way that photography doesn’t. New Zealand sits beneath the Antarctic hole in the ozone layer, which is a layer of atmospheric gas that absorbs ultraviolet rays in other parts of the world. Without that absorption, the sun here is brighter, hotter, clearer, and burns you faster. It also makes colors more vivid. Emerald greens are verdant, the Pacific is cerulean, and you can see farther and more clearly than in other places. It creates an entirely different color palette, whose different gradations make for a unique chromatic world.
This can be disconcerting if you come from another chromatic world. Many years ago, a Canadian friend told me that she experienced a moment of derealization after emigrating here because she felt like she was looking at the world through an HDTV. I sometimes feel similarly. I’m almost used to it, but then the light will catch me off guard, I’ll see a different shade of green or blue illuminated by a different ozone layer, and it will suddenly render a familiar place alien.
I still dream in Northern Hemisphere light, and oil paintings trigger those dreams. I’ll see a Gustave Courbet painting that captures the specific way French sunlight refracts off airborne water molecules at the beach and it’ll tug at my heart. I’ll see a Pennsylvania Impressionist painting that shows the taller sky and softer sunlight of my home and wish that I was riding my bike along the Delaware River. I’ll see Winslow Homer’s Sunlight on the Coast (of Maine) (1890), and it’ll transport me back to winters in Cape Elizabeth, watching the blue-black Atlantic slab against slate-grey rocky beaches. I’ll close my eyes, imagine myself back there, and keenly feel the 9,000 miles of distance between where I live and where I was born.
I think oil paintings do this to me in a way that photos don’t because oil painters have to construct light so carefully that it makes them attentive to its gradations. In Toi o Tāmaki’s “Light from Tate: 1700s to Now” exhibit a few years ago, the curators wrote that before the English painter J.M.W. Turner started working in the mid-1800s, oil painters used light to depict metaphorical virtue. They’d paint it more crudely in rays and halos and it would fall on subjects, like Jesus, Mary, angels, or royalty who the painter wanted to depict as particularly noble and enlightened. You can see this in paintings like Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s The Infant Christ Distributing Bread to the Pilgrims (1678). Turner, however, devoted the later part of his life to depicting light as an atmospheric phenomenon. In his abolitionist painting The Slave Ship (1840), he uses it to render things fiery, make solid forms translucent, and to show the slave trade as being as historically impermanent as light on the water.
Turner blew the lid off how painters could depict light and helped spark the Impressionists and Abstractionists. The paintings I like — close atmospheric studies of light and landscape — exist thanks to him. There’s something about good light and landscape painting that opens my heart and mind, too. In Essay 5 of Ways of Seeing, John Berger writes that while oil paintings of objects were sumptuous and substantial to “demonstrate the desirability of what money could buy,” paintings of the light and sky “defied possession.” When I look at them, I feel connected to a place I’ve been, and they invoke a feeling that national identity signifiers like buildings, flags, or pictures of George Washington never could. They give me something to be homesick for in a place that’s functionally the Fourth Reich now. They remind me that the land existed before the settler state and will continue to exist after, and that no matter how hard people try, no one can own the light, the sky, and the air itself.
As I make a home here, I’m making an effort to acquaint myself with Antipodean sky portraiture and color descriptions. I think Sarah Oostendorp’s paintings capture Aotearoa’s North Island sky unlike any other painter’s, specifically how our uniquely clear sunsets refract off cirrus clouds near the sea. I’m also trying to read more Janet Frame, after seeing that she described the South Island as “swamp red, beastie gold, sky grey, railway red, railway yellow, macrocarpa green, tussock gold, snowgrass gold, penny-orange orange, milk white, snowberry white, all lit by the sky of snow light reflected from Antarctica,” in her autobiography. I think at some point, the color palette in my mind will shift, and I’ll start dreaming in Antipodean light instead of American. But for now, I close my eyes, see the tall Pennsylvania sky near my parents’ house, and mourn a home I’m afraid to return to.
Tāmaki (Auckland) Events
My friends are putting on a rave to raise funds for a Universal Dental Care Campaign called “Flossin’” this coming Saturday, May 17. I think it’ll be good. You can buy tickets here.
The Capitol Cinema Film Club is playing Orson Welles’s The Trial (1962) based on Kafka’s novel of the same name on Wednesday, May 28 at 8pm at The Capitol Cinema in Mt. Eden. I like Orson Welles and I’m looking forward to this one.
Recommended Reading
I liked this essay by Lucie Elven about Janet Frame, which is where I pulled the quote from her autobiography from. Elven gets right at New Zealand’s settler heart of darkness, asking “Why, during the late 19th-century gold rush when it was planned and constructed, did the largest building in New Zealand need to be an asylum? Why was it built in Scots Baronial style, why were a thousand keys needed for its doors and why did it have ‘an observation tower almost fifty metres tall’?” Despite our branding as “The Paradise of the South Pacific,” this is a settler-colonial country governed by white supremacists, and both Elven and Frame interrogate the history of this place more than our propagandists ever will.
I liked this essay by Jake Romm about how Zionist madness mirrors the endless, atemporal phone scroll.
I liked this obituary of poet Joshua Clover by Sarah Miller. The ending moved me to tears and it’s worth subscribing to her blog for.
Quite moving, in an unexpected way. Loved this. And love the deeper dive into J. Frame. I love how she sees this country without scales.
Dang this is so good! Never thought about the paintings that way, but man it’s true. Missing desert ochre, always. Blinded by the light here, in joyous lonesome awe. Loved this!