It is a blue eye of lake ice opened where the wind has blown away the snow. It is the flame-like flicker of red when a cardinal suddenly flits into view.
I have lived through sixty-five northern winters. Each year when the sun dips low along the horizon, and the light slants just so in the birch trees, I feel it welling up in me like an elemental longing - the craving for color, something to ballast me against the deep days of gray and white of winter.
I walk the woods looking for the ink-blue streaks of blue jays against the snow.
And wander the lakeshore hoping for that pearl-pink just after sunset or a deep blue, the color of longing, just after the stars have shown.
It can run deep. I believe that humans have a need for color as strong as their need for light.
We are built for color vision. Although the human eye has nearly 100 million “rods” which are used for seeing in low light settings, that is a far smaller number than nocturnal creatures whose eyes are often much larger in proportion to their skulls. Instead, that relatively low number of rods leaves room in our eyes for almost 5 million “cones” which require more light to activate but help us discern color.
Research has estimated that a healthy human eye in the optimum lighting conditions can see nearly a million different shades of color with our three type of cone cells — red, green, and blue — each capable of parsing out at least 100 different shades a piece resulting in a palette of around a million subtly different combinations to choose from.
In winter, our color-hungry eyes can be starved by constant gray days and white horizons as that palate dwindles. We begin to crave color.
A few years ago, in the depth of a gray-swaddled winter, I began to experiment with ways to create my own color when I couldn’t find it outside. I haunted the Goodwill stores and antique shops looking for glassware: your grandmother’s forgotten candy-dish or spiral-ridged glass pitchers that once clinked with ice cubes and lemonade on a front porch somewhere. I would buy handfuls, trunk loads, and bring them home, set them up against a black backdrop, hold them in place with a vice, and bring them to life again with colored fabric lit by studio lights.
It was as if the light of summer had been waiting for just that moment to jump out in the glass. I thought of it as a chip of summer in the winter darkness, a celebration of light, and a reminder that winter cannot, even this far north, last forever.
Or, I would carry a crowbar and leverage slabs of lake ice into the back of the car, carry those into the studio and photograph the same colored fabric through the lens of melting ice.
I saturated my eyes with color — oil droplets on water, silk scarves blown into the air by a hidden fan, all of it dripping with colors that washed over my light-starved soul like sun-warmed oil. I was drunk with color.
And then I stopped, just stopped.
I don’t remember making a conscious decision or thinking through my reasons. I simply put away the bolts of fabric, the studio lights, the vice that held the ice and glass in place, and stopped. Instead, I went back outside.
Maybe it had been too much, too contrived, that phantasmagorical explosion of light and color I had created in the studio. Too easy, too … something. I don’t know, but I put it all aside and stepped again into the gray and white world of the winter woods.
I remember a sense of loss, a heaviness at first. I would walk with my eyes down at my feet, seeing nothing, as if mourning the loss of color.
Slowly though, my eyes began to adjust, to see again. Gone were the mind-bending, eye-saturating explosions of color but I began to see the smaller joys — a single stalk in the curved blue shadows of a hillside.
The burnt-orange orbs of last year’s apples.
The short-lived spot of red in the morning’s sunrise.
And slowly, slowly, the color began to seep back in. I came to realize that it was always there if I looked hard enough, even in the heart of the grayest days. It is hidden sometimes. It can be short-lived, but it is there and, I began to see it again. Slowly, I’ve come to believe, it doesn’t take trumpets of color blasting from the sky to move us. Little flecks, as small as a reflection in the ice, can be enough if we simply let it.
Let me know what colors you see in your winter world.
— Jeff Rennicke
Yes the struggle is real for the photographer and artist . It is why the inside of my house hangs on to the colorful Christmas decor way past the time when normal people have long since put it away . Today was the day to carefully remove all the lovely , colorful , memory filled ornaments . The tree is petrified and needs to leave , however there was a year that the carefully tended tree extended way into February and I called the grower and complained that the tree refused to die and was sprouting new greenery. After He got over his surprise at my call he said yes that can happen !
Well anyway there can be surprising color in the ice caves when they are accessible and even when they are not , I was so surprised looking down from the trail one March at the deep blue green of the water contrasting with a small icing of snow on the the red rock after trampling thru endless white trees and snow against deep blue skies to get there . It is the grey days that are the hardest .
You have some remarkable images of the patterns of ice slabs in pink and blue . Keep carrying on for the rest of us far away from the place we love right now .
Stunning. Potent.