Sea Fog
January 2006
Painting Point Reyes
by Susan Hall
Point Reyes is the center of my painting life. Explaining why in words is hard — a little like taking the wings off a butterfly to see how it flies. I find this landscape, its weather, and its inhabitants deep and provocative, filled with soul, and I have been held captive by it my entire life.
Point Reyes has been my life and when I haven’t lived here, it has been an underground stream that spoke to me in dreams and visions. The land is a richly varied terrain: forest chaparral, dense vegetation, stone, and sand. This land has a thousand moods, made more subtle and complicated by the wind, rain, and fog, and has moved me towards silence and reflection.
These paintings depict landscapes that I have returned to over and over again, in my mind, my heart, or my body. They are places I have seen in time and over time in many kinds of weather and seasons. I have experienced them at different points of my life, and they have exerted their presence on me, forming an intimacy that comes out of the passage of time. Their qualities of light, substance, color, texture, and even smell, have attuned my perceptions, and changed me in the same way that any long-term, beloved relationship will.
My memories pour and spread unbidden into my paintings. It is not that I paint the memories (that would be too artificial and literal), but I can be open to them. I open the door to memories as they inform my painting; atmosphere and moments remembered awaken my senses and instill the commonplace with the loaded intensity of the past.
What appeals to me are the sensuous aspects that speak of feeling and intensity, or a subtlety that pervades a connected way of life from the past.
This connectedness is why farming and ranching feel right — adding to the landscape rather than detracting from it. Man in these places is struggling, not overcoming, not ignoring, but working with and connecting with nature. This sense of proportion has been lost in our modern interaction with the land and affects even how we perceive beauty. The beauty of nature and humans working together replenishes, strengthens, puts in order, and has a sense of scale and proportion.
I miss the stories I heard as a child from old people; stories that were part of the community, integral to it. There was time to hear these stories because everything was so much slower; cars were slow, communication was slow, everything moved at a leisurely pace. The old people informed me of what this place was like before I entered it. They took me into the past of his land and its people. The colors and textures of their stories opened up a world that integrated my reality with the history of the place.
My paintings often reflect the placement of the human element in nature. When I enter a landscape, I feel its vast sensuous richness as if I were holding a kite by a string that ties me to the human element, yet allows me the full range of experience and movement in nature.
I see that our ancestors’ need to make a living from nature also meant making peace with it. So tucking a house deep into a cove or small valley meant protection from elements, and the landscape enfolded the human venture in an aesthetically pleasing way. The eye is drawn to look at rooflines and fences with the same absorption as a line of oaks and bays winding its way across a hillside. There is a harmony that emerges from a human struggle with nature that fills a space in the heart.
My work is not just a sharp focus, for often the landscape is about peripheral vision. An osprey soaring high above on a thermal exerts its influence on the landscape in a subtly felt way. All senses enter into landscape paintings. Smells and sounds are as important as texture and light. Sound particularly; silence as rich and awesome as the bay in early morning when not a ripple stirs the water. Gradually, the silence deepens inside and out as the movement of a fish, or a seal poking its head above the water, becomes a talisman, a mantra for inner depth, inner silence.
I often paint the night because of the quiet; the subtleties of sense, feelings and memory are stronger. As daytime recedes, the senses become more tuned and receptive. By moon and starlight, I feel forms and shapes become diffused and mysterious as a deeper reality emerges. Painting, for me, is a way to enter this world of mystery and touch the multidimensional depth and rivers of the past, present, and future.
Susan Hall lives and paints in her native place of Point Reyes Station, California. She returned there after twenty-two years of painting and teaching in New York City. She has exhibited in many galleries and museums including the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and SF MOMA. This essay first appeared in her book Painting Point Reyes (Green Bridge Press). View more of her work at susanhall.org
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