Crumley - The Nature of Winter

The nature of winter is one of simplicities. The wild world is reduced to its barest essentials. It is a self-portrait worked in low light with a limited palette of pastels. Here, for example, is one such portrait.

You might come across it and think at first glance that you had wandered into the motif for a painting by Monet at the height of his Impressionist powers. Three quarters of the composition is given over to a soft-focus screen of trees at dusk, and this sets the tone, establishes the atmosphere. Individual trees are hinted at rather than rendered explicitly, because between the screen of trees and the viewer there is a second screen, flimsy and translucent, but essential to the startling effect of the whole: it is a screen of falling snow. The remaining quarter of this self-portrait of winter the bottom quarter is itself divided into three distinct and shallow horizontal bands. There is first a band of tall grass, which meshes raggedly with the lower parts of the trees. It is a pale, straw-coloured band; it speaks as eloquently as the falling snow of winter, and its shade contrasts sharply with the darkening bluey-greeny-grey of the trees. At the very bottom of the portrait is a slim band of water, pale and featureless and colourless, so the setting is defined as the bank of a river or the shore of a lake. And all these bands of colour trees, grass and water stretch from edge to edge as far as the eye can see. There is no vertical emphasis in this self-portrait. All is hunkered down and stretched wide and taut as... well, as taut as an artists canvas.

The falling snow has just begun, and as yet it clings to nothing, and there is no wind, for it falls straight down, yet it is the snow and the subdued light which impart the sense of the season and the hour of the day. Winter, at the very moment you stand before this self-portrait, is battening down in preparation for a long and very cold night.

It may not sound like much of a portrait (for the writer must always come up short when he tries to render the artists visualisation with his palette of words), but I have not yet told you about the third horizontal band, the one between the grass and the water. Unlike the other horizontals, it stretches only seven-eighths of the way across the composition from left to right, and it is much shallower than the other bands. Yet the viewers eye homes in on it at once with the certainty of moth to flame, which is of course precisely what the artist intended. It shows, hunched against the cold, a loosely-spaced frieze of forty-four little egrets. A forty-fifth glides in to land just inside the right-hand edge. The whole thing is one of the most moving and enduring images of nature I have ever seen, and I have been carrying it around in my head for thirty years now. I was asked by someone in the audience at a book festival what I was working on, and when I said that it was a book about the nature of winter, she asked, And what does that look like? I said it was still a secret, but what I could have said was, A long line of forty-four little egrets standing on the shore of a lake at dusk just as the snow starts falling, and a forty-fifth little egret glides in to land.

And it is not a painting by Monet, although the artist has clearly set out to achieve something like an Impressionist effect. In fact, it is not a painting at all, but a photograph. It lies on my oak table as I write, and even on a spring day of bright sunshine it contrives to thrill and chill me in the same instant, as it did that day in 1988 when for the first time I turned a page in one of the most remarkable and downright exquisite nature books I have ever owned, and there it was, and I probably gasped out loud. The book is The White Egret (Blandford, 1988) by a Japanese photographer, Shingi Itoh, and time without number in the intervening years I have taken it down from my bookshelves when I felt fed up or ill at ease or dissatisfied with something I had just written, and I have felt my mood lighten or my sense of perspective readjust to a more even keel in the reflected light of its quite magical aura.

Sometimes when Im out and alone in the company of nature and the raw beauty of the setting takes over from whatever original purpose had led me there, I think about the elusive nature of what I aspire to as a writer, of the arrogance that underpins the ambition to incarcerate what lies before me within the covers of a book. Then I think of Shingi Itoh and his book, and I reassure myself of the merits of the endeavour, if you put in the work, if you approach it in the right frame of mind. In his preface to what is primarily a photographic essay, he wrote:

I have taken more than one hundred thousand photographs of egrets ... the task of capturing the true beauty of the lustrous, snow-white egret on film has been completely beyond my capabilities, although I have continued to take pictures of them. As difficult as this task might be ... I have felt a need to understand the egrets movements and behaviour, their enduring existence, and to share what I have learned ...