The news here is snow. Snow is Central Virginia’s equivalent of volcanic eruptions. Not nearly as awkward though. This storm started Wednesday evening at 5 PM and ended Thursday night about 9 PM. What we think of as the surface of the earth is for the moment about a foot and a half higher than usual, which actually changes the perspective of the ground dramatically. This and the shift in color make snow dramatic; and snow also seems subjectively more immersive than, say, rain or sleet.
In a big snow, the sky itself seems to be snow, and snow has texture. A storm like this one managed to run a gamut of textures, from hard-frozen silvery dust at its beginning to flat iridescent plates, like little fragments of mica or muscovite, to conventional flakes and clumps of flakes. For a good while the snow was falling at the rate of a couple of inches an hour, the point at which whole landscape features disappear behind falling snow.
Various temperature bands in this storm all had their own snow signatures, or granular ice signatures. As of this afternoon, the snow has become a melting snow, since it is above freezing today, and that is something we have not seen much of in recent weeks.
In a big snow, the sky itself seems to be snow, and snow has texture. A storm like this one managed to run a gamut of textures, from hard-frozen silvery dust at its beginning to flat iridescent plates, like little fragments of mica or muscovite, to conventional flakes and clumps of flakes. For a good while the snow was falling at the rate of a couple of inches an hour, the point at which whole landscape features disappear behind falling snow.
Various temperature bands in this storm all had their own snow signatures, or granular ice signatures. As of this afternoon, the snow has become a melting snow, since it is above freezing today, and that is something we have not seen much of in recent weeks.
In sunlight, snow forces a lot of impressionistic contrasts out of the shadows. Conversely, under clouded conditions snow tends to erase shadows. Snow has a lot to do with light. Many favorite Japanese woodcuts are snow scenes. I’m not sure why this should be, but as has been observed, classical Japanese woodblocks are characteristically shadowless, as if the scenes and people are wholly Platonic or on some idealized plane, or as if the artists and by extension the viewers are so wholly identified with light itself that, like the face of the sun, we never see a shadow. It’s the least Western thing about the classic Japanese woodblocks.
Modern shin hanga of course shows a lot of shadow experimentation, but it would be too abrupt to associate this with western influence. The lack of shadow in Harunobu, Utamaro, or Eishi has to be considered against the prevalence of shadow in the places where these prints were displayed. As Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki observed, in his short elegant study In Praise of Shadows, Japanese classic architecture and landscaping is about the creation and manipulation of shadows, space defined by its shadows. I think the answer, in the old woodblocks, is the artist’s message, maybe an unconscious one, that our eyes are the light. Aat least in a paradoxical way, shadows are irrelevant. One is reminded of Goethe’s peculiar theory of physics in which sight is an active, not a passive property; a kind of radar from the eyes, as if the light were in us and the eye was essential to evoke the external sense of light. There really is something Berkeleyesque and Protestant about this. But, like foam on the wave, I appear to digress. Enough to say, when old-fashioned Japanese woodblocks turn to snow scenes, they ironically become entirely naturalistic.
Maybe it’s the elemental nature of snow that appeals so strongly. It’s crystal. It refracts and reflects. A world under snow has been strangely mineralized and thus somehow rendered transcendent and original. A week or two ago, after a couple of inch dusting in single-degree weather, walking to work behind the university practice fields in the early sunlight at about 8 degrees F, the surface of the ground was spectacularly gemlike, by which I mean prismatic, sparkling in diamond colors. Any breath of air sent this finely particulate snow drifting from the tree limbs in clouds of sparkling rainbow dust. It was worth getting up and walking across hard-frozen fields to see.
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