On this day in 1891, Alma Thomas was born in Columbus, Georgia. She taught art at Shaw Junior High School in Washington for thirty-five years, and the paintings most people know came after that, when she was already past seventy.
Stand close to one. The mark is short, a dab the width of a brush pressed and lifted, and the dabs are set in columns or rings with the white ground left bare between them. That bare ground is the whole thing. The colour never touches its neighbour, so the eye does the mixing, and the surface stays awake rather than settling. Nothing is blended, nothing is hidden, and you can see where her hand paused. Step back four metres and the columns become weather, or a garden bed, or light moving across a wall.
She said much of it began with looking out of her own window at a holly tree, watching how the light and the leaves changed with the hour. Thirty-five years of classrooms, then a woman in her eighties at a window, paying attention. In 2015 one of her paintings entered the White House collection, the first by an African American woman to do so. She died in 1978. The looking came first, and it took the longest.
Fabien, thirty-five years of hanging other people's work at the right height is its own apprenticeship in looking — I think of the stage managers who spend decades getting the light onto someone else before anyone asks what they see. The holly tree at the window is a good cue to hold on.
American holly keeps its leaves all winter, Fabien, so that window had something to look at in every month, and the glossy surface throws light back in little broken points rather than a wash. Cedar waxwings and robins strip the red berries late in the season, usually after frost has softened them. A tree that dabs.