I meant for To Soar to be almost entirely white.
That was the plan from the first sketch. Torn paper glued in relief across an eight by eight foot sheet, then washed in whites so close to one another you would have to stand still to see where one ended and the next began. Sandhill cranes lifting out of a wetland, washed in sunlight, the birds and the water made of the same pale value. I wanted the relief to carry the piece, the tear lines and the ridges where one sheet lifts off another, and the quiet surface for a small intimate space.
What I had imagined depended on someone standing in front of the work, with light moving across a raised edge as they shifted their weight. The camera would never see that.
So I brought color in to find the edges.
Chartreuse and moss pooled into the low places of the paper and stopped at the tear lines. Teal settled under the lily pads. Lilac and violet came down in drips, and each drip bent and caught on the ridges it crossed on the way down. Thin lines of cobalt and indigo pastel follow the tops of the folds. Coral went into the lilies and red went into the crowns.
The red is accurate. A sandhill crane's crown is bare skin, and it flushes brighter when the bird is excited or alarmed. The rest of the bird is gray, and many sandhills spend part of the year stained the color of rust because they preen iron-rich mud into their feathers. They color themselves with the wetland they live in.
I had pictured a white bird on a white ground, clean and separate from its marsh. The real bird carries its marsh on its body. If you get close to the cranes in the foreground, you'll find faint rust on their wings, the same iron the birds pick up from the mud.
The cranes in the center of To Soar are still mostly white, but now they rise out of green water, and the white reads because of the color around it.
The lilies follow the same logic. A water lily roots in anaerobic muck, mud with almost no oxygen in it, and opens on the surface every morning. The flower needs the dark water under the pad to have something to rise out of.
I started adding color because of the camera. I kept adding it because the piece needed its water.
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