Sunsets

On the bus from Seattle to Vancouver, I had the good fortune to sit in the front row and watch the countryside, so different from the East Coast I am accustomed to seeing. On either side, there were huge pine trees, on the right hand side growing among the rocky terrain. Occasionally, we sped past a waterfall and I, the blase city girl, found myself gasping in delight.

The bus rounded a bend, and suddenly the large sky reappeared in so many shades of yellow, pink, orange, green, purple, with white and gray and navy clouds. I stopped reading for a while to enjoy the simple picture presented by the sun setting. Which is when, the conductor suddenly said: "If you painted it just like that, no one would believe it was real".

She is right in part because it was so pretty. But it also made me think that she should put it in those terms. I was struck, again and only because it was in such an unexpected context, that there is an expectation of truthfulness in art. Now of course, if it is too realistically painted, the questions can become, why bother? There is photography. But if it does not correlate to the viewer's personal vision of reality than the picture deceives. Interestingly, and as the bus conductor so rightly pointed out, if it is realistic it is least likely to accepted as such.

Turner Sunset c. 1830-5

Oscar Wilde once joked that Turner invented sunsets, meaning of course that we would never recover from the influence of his pictures of sunsets. Certainly, the vivid colors of his paintings seem the epitome of the sunset, and a sunset must somehow be as orange to be accepted as glorious. We can't escape the influence of others. They are there in the fragile neural connections of our mind. Traveling, however, can sometimes shift the comfortable state we have cultivated and a simple remark can lead to new thoughts.

I never notice sunsets at home because I am too busy, or so I thought. I am not sure that I see it that way now. Traveling today reminded me that I don't need to (not) see things the way I have, or others do. But if I want to keep seeing things for myself, then I will likely have to stay open to a surprise. A surprise that may scintillate but is as likely to disenchant, because a truly personal vision is not always a pretty one.