Emenations of Time and Eternity

Shen Wei, Untitled No. 11, 2013, oil and acrylic on linen canvas, 82 x 211 inches

Radical visions of existence, tumultuous, atmospheric, at once primordial and apocalyptic - the monumental paintings of multidisciplinary artist Shen Wei fuse Western abstract-expressionism at its most emotional with the perennial goal of Chinese landscape painting: to render the magical nature of consciousness as the glorious dance of absence and presence at the secret heart of being.

Shen Wei's Untitled #13 at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

For the historical Chinese landscapists, the goal of art was to take us to the very center of awareness of existence toward envelopment in moments of pure being. Shen Wei's contemporary paintings do this, but without the traditional sense of tranquility and transcendence. In the Untitled series of 2013, Shen Wei uses a limited palette of black, white, and brown and invites darker, more primal forces into his work. And although the tradition of of the mythical mind-scapes of ancient China is everywhere present, he departs radically in materials, composition, technique, and thus effect. What he offers "seems to leave us suspended between the dissolution of forms, between the occult and the heavenly, and beyond space and time," in the apt words of the accompanying catalogue.

Shen Wei, Untitled Number 13, 2013-2014, oil and acrylic on linen canvas, 165 x 218 inches

In the "cosmos in flux" above, bits of landscape, broken structures, mythical beings like dragons, natural elements like earth, air, and water morph in and out of the gestural paint. 

These are closeups:

A manmade structure of some kind being swept away in an apocalyptic flood, I think.

There's another manmade structure, maybe a fence, being washed away in the flood.

Plant, waterfall, erupting lava - your choice, purposely so.

The wall text notes that "small dabs of the brush suggest lone figures, birds or dragons." Definitely calling this one for a bearded dude in a robe piloting some kind of cat-frog-dragon over the hoary abyss.

By putting aside the traditional sumi-i ink brush and emphasizing the material through the drips, splashes, pools, and clumps of abstract painting, Wei's Untitled series stresses surface and expression. Appropriate to our moment in history, this strategy limits the degree of spiritual transcendence in the work, even as it brings Chinese landscape into the 21st century. Consequently, instead of a Zen-like state of Pure Consciousness, the work reflects the fractured global reality of contemporary life, at the level of both the social and the personal: "I am made of Eastern and Western ingredients," he says. "Now wherever I work or live, I bring, express, and share this conjunction of states of being."

A selection of Wen's work in paint, film, and dance is on display at the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum until June 30, 2021. It's this painting that drew me and that I want to write about here.

Chinese landscape painting reflects the Taoist understanding of the life force in all things simultaneously cycling between coming-into-being and dissolving-into-nothingness, beyond logical knowing and naming. In the extraordinary little book, "Existence, A Story," author David Hinton shows how Chinese landscape painting emanates the deep nature of existence not by representing but by directly depicting - his word is enacting - Taoist and Ch'an (Zen) spirituality's perception of "the inner processes and forces shaping the ten thousand things":

"A painting is itself the Cosmos in microcosm, alive with those cosmological principles of Absence and Presence... the emptiness in a painting extends beyond the picture frame, suggesting the vastness of the Cosmos. And gazing at it with a mirror-deep mind, as the ancients often did for hours at a time as a form of deep spiritual practice, we are returned to dwell here in the beginning, where consciousness and landscape are woven together in a single existence-tissue, where we experience the dynamic Cosmos in a complete and distilled way rarely possible in ordinary life: whole and with perfect immediacy." (Existence, A Story, p. 90)

Here's a series of traditional Chinese landscape paintings paired with one of Wei's followed by closeups of Wei's.

Traditional landscape: Mountains, Trees, Mist (Sung Dynasty)

Shen Wei

Above: Traditional Chinese landscape painting: Travelers Among Mountains and Streams, ink and slight colour on silk hanging scroll, by Fan Kuan, c. 960–c. 1030, Bei (Northern) Song dynasty; in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan.

Below: Shen Wei, Reflecting Elements No. 2, 2019-2020, oil on linen

Shen Wei, Reflecting Elements #2, 2019-2020 Oil on linen

Shen Wei, Reflecting Elements 1-5, 2019-2020

Close-up of Reflecting Elements #2

In Wei's  most traditional-seeming (and most recent, 2020) canvases, existence indeed rises to the surface and recedes into the depths, but not in the way it does in traditional Chinese landscape painting. Avoiding mimetic reference to things like streams, mountains, or trees, Wei depicts something like the "existence-tissue," ch'i, or life force itself, continuously (and chaotically) manifesting and un-manifesting before it even has a chance to fully become any one thing. 

A sixth in the series of Reflecting Elements.

Here as in the "Untitled" series, the imagery is unsettled, restless, yet also cosmic and elemental. Wei is channeling raw, primal forces the way Pollock's brush did, seemingly mixing up all the elements in every partial, morphing "image." The "Untitled" series is what made Wei's name.

Turning to one of that series, let's again start with a traditional Chinese ink painting of a landscape and then look at Shen Wei. 

Xia Gu, Pure and Remote Views of Streams and Mountains, Sung Dynasty (c. 970-1100)

Shen Wei, Untitled No. 1, 2013, oil and acrylic on linen canvas, 82 x 211 inches

The format is similar, the idea is similar: depict a spiritual state of being by pretending to paint a landscape - but there the similarities end.

Using oil and acrylic, not ink, and avoiding direct reference to any natural topography, Shen Wei paints a vision for our times. The following are closeups of the above painting Untitled No. 1.

  

Flows of smoke, water, "existence tissue," ch'i

Like a NASA photo of a moving storm.

All kinds of textures in the paint here.

This apparently is a sea-monster of sorts.

And this is clearly the scaled, serpentine head of a dragon.

Wonderful swirls of paint!

Shen Wei blends tradition and contemporary trends to make important and compelling paintings for our times.

Redeeming Darkness: Notes on Resilience

Any Human Thing #2 ("I promise nothing complete; for any human thing supposed to be complete must for that very reason infallibly be faulty.") from Loomings, tar and oil on canvas.

Why make art if there isn’t going to be a civilization to receive it?

 

What kind of art would be worth making if human extinction, in say 30 years, were certain? The evidence is all too explicit that we are living in the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch resulting from human intervention in the biosphere. We are experiencing a corresponding “sixth great extinction,” in which humans are steadily generating the conditions that have already eliminated 50-90%+ of all life on earth five times in the planet’s distant history (including death-by-high-atmospheric-CO2-concentrations and ocean-acidification/de-oxygenation). We can’t seem to stop destroying individual lives, local populations, and entire species in unprecedented numbers, threatening the fundamental social and ecological systems that make life on earth possible. 

 

In short, humanity on many new fronts appears to be sabotaging itself more efficiently than ever. It is the central issue of our age and the most serious problem in human history. How will artists respond?

 

In a time of radical insecurity, celebrating the pleasures and ignoring the pains begins to feel morally irresponsible. As a public act (that is, as soon as it’s shown), art has a moral dimension. As Shelley says, “A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.”

 

Past fear, anger, and mourning, one way out of paralysis is be all-the-way open: to create on behalf of human potential alone. In a dark time, only the highest ideals matter.

 

Art’s role is to elevate humankind. It’s that grandiose and that simple. This means, among many other things, that art’s essential value lies not in entertaining, educating, or consoling humanity but in redeeming it. Art redeems humanity by addressing itself to the best of which humanity is capable. This has always been the case, but never has it seemed more necessary to cultivate this way of making. 

- From the essay Meditations in the Dark: On Making Art in a Difficult Time, available in a limited, hands-sewn edition of 60 copies for $16 plus shipping. Also available: Loomings, Paintings in Tar, Oil & Gold Leaf, with writings on Melville, America, and the Redeeming Power of Darkness (paperback, 48 pages, with reproductions of paintings from Loomings and quotes from Moby-Dick, $18, plus shipping). If interested in purchasing a book, contact chris@christophervolpe.com.

Reading the Sexual and Social Dynamics in Degas' Compositions

It's no secret to art historians and discerning viewers that Degas did not make pretty pictures of ballerinas. His paintings of the ballet in Paris are a conscious and (back then) shocking elevation of actual contemporary life to the level of high art. Yet they also include stark, wry, and unflinching commentaries on the social and sexual dynamics of bourgeois culture, hidden as it were, in plain sight. 

That famous bronze of the fourteen-year-old girl ballerina he made? 

Edgar Degas

Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, 1878-1881

National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Critics immediately recognized it as a "creature from the underworld," that is, the brothel culture of the stage. Degas surely knew such a thing would be controversial; this, after all, is an underage prostitute. One writer called the figure a "flower of precocious depravity" with a "face, marked by the hateful promise of every vice" thrust forward "with bestial effrontery."

But I want to look at how Degas uses the formal elements of art - particularly composition - as the site where this darker content plays out between us, the viewers, the objects of Degas' observation (the ballerinas) and his inclusion of the wealthy and powerful men who paid money to enjoy them after the curtain went down. I'll leave it to others to elaborate on a what misogynist he was and to detail the merciless way he treated the already exploited women he called his "little monkey girls." 

I'll just say that I don't see sadism in Degas' work. I take him at his word when, bristling at being grouped with the Impressionists he'd helped establish, he called himself a realist. He was that, and of a special stripe - his observations of reality went where the camera could not: To subversively document the true beauty and tension he saw playing out just beneath the surface of modern life. 

I recently began studying Degas' monotypes for technical tips in composition, but when I did my head exploded at how Degas’ compositions always do more than “move the eye” through his paintings - they also convey meaning. The time and geography have changed so much since the late 19th c. Paris he took as his primary motif, that we generally miss most of the subtleties and end up deeply admiring his technique - his unusual views of the human body coupled with his spectacular skill in draftsmanship, his highly original compositions and subject matter, and his mastery of color - without considering his use of those elements to advance content.

Consider one of his monotypes in the revealing light of this note about it from "Degas Monotypes - A Catalogue Raisonnee":

"In late 19th-century Paris, the ballet was the profession of (lower-class) girls and young women (they were referred to as “petits rats,” little rats) who were available for sexual hire. In this monotype, a gentleman of means meets with a Madame Cardinal in the coulisses (wings) of the Opéra to arrange for a private rendezvous with one of her daughters.” (parentheses mine)

You read that right - the ballet was a place where the mothers of lower class girls not only encouraged liaisons with older men who might, at least for a time, support them, but also literally pimped them out to these moneyed "gentlemen" of the higher classes. 

Now look how Degas has composed this picture to emphasize the hopelessly unequal relations in the positions of power - between the dark engulfing bulk of the leaning "gentleman" and the diminutive, dirty-white figure of the mother of the girl he’s about to pay for. And what are we to make of those dabs of red on her hat, arm dress?

What museum curators and art historians of Degas have traditionally discussed is his incipient modernism; how, as a restless experimenter (we'd call much of his work "multimedia" today), he conveyed the behind-the-scenes views of artificially lit contemporary life, including the crowded backstage bustle of the opera house. His paintings seem to pluck random moments from the fast-paced flow of life, framing and cropping his subjects casually and a bit awkwardly, in a manner akin to a snapshot taken by the new medium of photography. But if we combine the strategy of mimicking the snapshot with the subtleties that advance Degas' underlying content, we can see how his appropriation of photography into painting was more than either a technical device or a gambit to emphasize the modernity and immediacy of his pictures. The example of photography allowed Degas in his most meaningful work to fuse seemingly objective, observational seeing with an artistic inner vision of the life around him. And in the case of the next image we'll look at, it allowed Degas to deliberately place the viewer in the position of the unseen observer, that is, the voyeur - re-enacting precisely what is going on under the surface of his work.

Take a close look at this second, often reproduced, pastel-over-monotype.

After the initial overall impression, when we really look (that is, when we allow our eyes to travel through the composition) what do we see first? For me, it's the leash, I mean ribbon, around the dancer’s neck. After the initial glance at that tutu, her neck is the first thing that we really see; the unflatteringly lit face it draws us to largely remains a blur, but between the ribbon and her neck there's the highest degree of contrast and the hardest edges in the entire  picture. As that ribbon which we see first trails away from her neck, it literally points to the dude whom viewers of the day would recognize as her “sponsor” (polite for exploiter). The half-hidden man happens to be the composition's second-darkest dark and the location of its second-strongest contrast, and hence the second thing we see. 

Prevented from leaving the frame by the curtain behind the half-hidden well-dressed man, our eyes return to the dancer where, having already seen the neck-ribbon, we now look down over the rest of her body. Landing here, we are strongly invited to admire (assess?) the girl's literally spotlighted, tipped forward bust as well as her shapely leg (the lightest light in the entire composition), which glows brightly as her thigh emerges from a sugary, fairytale radiance imparted by the footlight-illuminated frills of that tutu. If we return along the vertical axis of her poised body to the strong contrast at her neck and then to her face, where we started, following her outstretched arm this time and then moving back down again, we have literally enacted the "looking-her-up-and-down" of someone "checking her out."

Degas was certainly a master of drawing and of human anatomy and the off-center glance of the modern eye upon the fleeting moments of fast-paced urban reality. He was also a brilliant composer, who knew how to use the properties of art to embed his work with an original inner vision full of powerful psychology and meaning. The strongest art is always more than a pretty picture.

Hayley Barker: The World as Ecstatic Mystery

In “The Grass is Blue,” a series of paintings by Hayley Barker that just closed at SHRINE gallery in New York, nature is captured in colors that never appear in nature. Ferns are cobalt blue, poplars are deep purple, rivers run blue, red and marigold. The effect is somewhat holy. You look at the paintings and understand how, in pre-industrial times, people stood in nature, and experienced God. The unreality of the paintings, which nonetheless clearly reference the Earth, also belie exploitation.

- Brienne Walsh, reviewing "The Grass is Blue" in Forbes. Read the rest here. 

The work is a refreshing, ravishing treat for the eye and spirit.

Painting the Woods with Deborah Paris

“We can paint any number of things. But finding the things we were meant to paint is what we are after. Each of us must find our own country.” Such is the painter’s calling, as worded by landscape painter and tonalist Deborah Paris. Her marvelous book, due out this month, Painting the Woods: Nature, Memory and Metaphor fits the common definition of “instant classic.” Paris’s book is not another how-to book about painting. Rather it is, as the jacket says, "a place-based meditation on nature, art, memory, and time, grounded in Paris’s experiences over the course of a year in Lennox Woods,” an old-growth forest not far from the Choctaw Nation in Paris’s adopted home of rural Texas. 

Most refreshing is Paris’s tacit assumption that painting is about something (even if the painter can’t articulate exactly what) – by which is meant about something more than re-presenting aspects of the visible world, however interesting in themselves. Although careful observation of nature (“the fleeting effects of light”) played a big role in Paris’s desire to paint to begin with, she soon came to see that fleeting effects weren’t what she was after.  “I came to understand,” she writes, “that in fact my intention was the exact opposite. I was not interested in “capturing the moment,” the worn-out Impressionist cliché of contemporary plein air painting gurus. Rather than momentary effects, I was looking for a way to create a Proustian experience, one that was outside time and yet fully comprehensive of it, one that existed in paint rather than words.” 

Deborah Paris, November Reflected, 24 x 36  (2019)

I believe all really good artists, especially landscapists, know this intuitively. Yet most, when pressed, resort to repeating something about “sense of place,” the “play of color,” or just “light,” all of which, whether they realize it or not, like human anatomy to a Lucien Freud or a Michelangelo, is, or should be, beside the point. (After all, even the Impressionists weren’t just interested in light. Theirs was a radical, exuberating liberation of subject matter from academic shackles, and their paintings are spectacular and joyful celebrations of the modern, everyday world as it appears to cleansed perception intertwined with poetic insight.)

Painting the Woods is an exquisite and masterful blending of deep reflections on art and art-making. However, painting’s potential to express meaning is just one of the threads that tie Paris’s book together. Paris interweaves self-reflection and ideas about art with lyrically rendered, observational nature writing and a philosophical feeling for “the connectedness of the natural world and human experience.” All these elements go playfully chasing each other in and out of Paris’s autobiographical narrative core: Paris discovers Lennox’s old growth pines while anticipating an exhibition of paintings of the site scheduled for the following year.

Deborah Paris, Whose Woods These Are. 52 x 72 (2013-14)

Along with all of this, Paris delivers, in her comfortable, compellingly readable style, a lucid mini-history of landscape painting in the Western tradition, particularly British and American, through masters like Claude, Rosa, Turner, Constable. Durand, Inness, the Tonalists, and the author of the true Bible of how-to landscape painting, John Carlson. And a host of congenial literary lights are invited to the seminar, including Gaston Bachelard, Marcel Proust, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, right down to contemporary poet Edward Hirsch.

Paris's book reminded me that we're under no obligation to consider the visual arts in a wholly different category from poetry, literature, philosophy, and even music. They’re all about waking us up from the stupor of habit and self-limitation. It may be tempting to imagine figurative painting lends itself readily to telling the story of humanity, while landscape painting doesn’t. Indeed, as Paris notes, landscape painting was held in far lower regard than painting's other genres because of a perceived lack of “elevating” content. But in fact, “for landscape painters the natural world and the metaphors it inspires provide a direct route to the richest vein of meaning," Paris writes, "a taproot that nourishes our work and helps us make that leap from the personal to the universal.”

Deborah Paris, Late November, Lennox Woods. 20 x 16, 2020

To help explain how feeling and meaning happen in representational landscape painting, Paris cites Emerson’s ideas about metaphor and language, particularly his notion that “words are symbols of natural facts” and that “natural facts are symbols of . . . spiritual facts.” Hermeticists know this concept as "As above, so below," the idea that the spiritual world is revealed to mystical vision through what Emanuel Swedenborg called (and as Inness and Emerson both knew) "correspondences." Thoreau too, Paris writes, came to think of trees as “the raw material of tropes and symbols,” as he wrote in his journal.

In practical terms, “finding one’s voice” in painting, as in literature, can mean more than simply developing a distinctive style. It can also mean discovering why one needs to create at all, not just in terms of oneself but a sense of tapping into something universal, beyond just "me." 

“How could a painting truly resonate in the mind of the viewer if it merely mirrored my mind?” Paris muses. “That might make it of passing interest, but inevitably it would be disconnected from the viewer’s experience of it.” What the passionate landscape painter is really after, she suggests, is “a textured landscape constructed of the memories, experiences, and associations of a lifetime.” 

Deborah Paris, Autumn Sunrise, Lennox Woods. 18 x 24 (2013)

It comes down to feeling in the end and an artist’s commitment to moving past the surfaces of things. “We dig deep,” she writes, “seeing in a way that encourages us to link the felt life of nature with the strong undercurrents of thought and emotion running through our lives.” Rather than a “sense of place,” this leads to landscape painting that makes its own space, one where “memory and experience come together with matter and spirit.” 

It’s a rare book about painting that teaches you something about the intermingled dynamics of art-making, perception, memory, and emotion. This Paris succeeds in doing beautifully, and I feel fortunate for being invited to join her adventures through the closely observed landscape of Lenox, the mythical landscape of nature, and the real landscape of the mind.

Deborah Paris, Early Spring, Lennox Woods. 20 x 16  (2020)

Helen Booth: Life, Death, Memory, and Paint

I first fell in love with Helen Booth's very moody abstract landscapes - dark visions of stark lights, half-shadows, and void-black spaces devoid of landmark or structure.

Helen Booth, Winter Light

Helen Booth, Moonrise

And she's been making compelling, evocative abstract work alongside these for a while (her career spans 30 years). In Essence, I, II and III, below, the glowing lacework of looping lines sometimes allude to branches in a snowy landscape and other times to nothing but themselves, a bit like Cy Twombley's line-as-calligraphic-mark.

Helen Booth, Essence, 2008

Helen Booth, Essence II, 2008

What she's making now has me even more interested in her work, and her process of getting there is a great reminder to "trust thyself." In her paintings of the last two years, for which she has been awarded two prestigious grants, from the Pollock-Krasner and Adolph Gottlieb foundations, she concentrates on "the limitless variations of the single dot, and how the individual marks when placed side by side create a dialogue."

Helen Booth, Stardust, 145 cm x 145 cm, 2019

Helen Booth, Black on Black, 150 x 225cm, 2019

Helen Booth, Falling Water, 100 cm x 80 cm,  2019

This is really essential painting, yet for her (and I find for myself as well) it's full of meaning and suggestion. "The dot itself can be many things," she says, "a puncture wound, a beginning, an end, an existence or a loss. It can be the end of a sentence or a punctuation in a landscape. It can symbolize life and it can represent death - a full stop."

Her approach to the canvas seems at once more direct, more authentic, and more introspective and metaphysical, now that she's entering into the material in a way that the concrete references to the landscape didn't permit.

"Memory is also fundamental to my ideas," she says, "both personal memory and how it changes and morphs over a lifetime, and also the memory of Nature. How the magnitude of space and its incomprehensible meaning can also be found in the most micro of organisms." The "dot" in her work, then, can be a star or it can be a cell.

Helen Booth, Winter 1978, 150CM x 150CM, 2016

A trip to Iceland following a distressing period in hospital for complications from an abdominal procedure reinforced her personal belief that, "Nature is the most powerful force and that trying to capture the essence of nature in its purist form is what is important to me as an artist. The cycle of birth and rebirth, in life and in nature is key."

It took shaking the foundations (of her self and her career) for her to see it. "I felt that my landscape paintings had been exhausted," she told me in an email. "I was producing work that felt disconnected in so many ways. It was difficult, and still is to a certain extent, because my galleries expected me to produce the same work - and I did lose quite a few of my regular exhibition opportunities. When I was studying at Wimbledon School of Art, and when I was obviously 30 years younger, I spent a lot of my time experimenting with different ways to paint - and essentially just made work - without thinking too much about what it was that I was trying to achieve."

"After a particularly scary time health-wise (which thankfully wasn't too serious in the end), I realized that I had to make work that was truthful. I literally just started to work without thinking too much, losing myself in the beauty of paint again. A trip to Iceland earlier this year firmed up so many ideas. My advice would be to just stop, if you can, and just follow your instincts and allow yourself the time and space to make mistakes. If you are like me, you will eventually find that you are making work that feels right."

Helen Booth, Repetition, 40x30cm, 2019

Helen Booth, White, 144cmx144cm, 2019

These works can recall the intricate and hypnotic white-on-white paintings of Agnes Martin:

Agnes Martin, Morning, 1965

Booth finds in Martin's Beauty is the Mystery of Life essay, published in 1989, a sort of clarion call for meaningful, if minimal, abstraction: "It is commonly thought that everything that is, can be put into words. But there is a wide range of emotional response that we make that cannot be put into words. We are so used to making these emotional responses that we are not consciously aware of them till they are represented in art work.” 

Like Martin's, Booth’s paintings apply an elemental, monochromatic aesthetic that offers a contemplative visual experience. If Martin goes zen in the chant-like repetition of tiny grid-lines (to state it crudely), Booth taps into the wabi-sabi of the pared-down mark - the point - t and finds it gorgeous with the organic, weathered beauty of imperfection.

It's fascinating to see her imagination zooming in and out in this series as she fully explores the concept. The work feels primal, simple and ordered yet pregnant with chaotic energy. I can imagine her in her studio excitedly saying to herself, "what if..." and "Oh wait, what if..." That's the place of enthusiasm (from en-theos, literally inhabited by the god/muse), a place I think any artist really needs and wants to live in. I'm inspired by her evolution and her bravery in stepping into authenticity.

Finally, here's a cool, short video on the continuing importance of landscape, and Iceland in particular, to her work.

Cat Balco's Exploding Stars in NYC

The sparks fly at Cat Balco's solo show My Exploding Stars at Rick Wester Fine Art in New York through January 25, 2020.

Cat is a fellow writer for Art New England, which is how we met. She makes large, dynamic geometric abstractions that envelop the viewer in color so vibrant and electric you can practically sun bathe in it. 

Foregrounding process and the basic elements of visual art, My Exploding Stars feels like an ode to painting itself. The palette emphasizes primary colors, giving the work a stripped down, modernistic, Pop Art-like vibe.

Yet the paintings lean in strongly toward abstract expressionism, because the material is very much allowed to act like paint. For example, the artist creates a sense of dynamic motion by turning the paintings as they dry to allow drips to reach in contrary directions.

Cat's brushstrokes are bold, declarative, strongly directional, and GIANT - she painted this work with a long-handled broom, which the gallery is displaying alongside the paintings. As a technique, this isn't new, but for the artist it's a reference to working class roots.

The paintings are gorgeous, vibrant, and feel very alive. For anyone who loves painting, My Exploding Stars should be a welcome celebration of color and light.