Seasons in different colors

When we moved to California, our friends in the northeast almost all at some point said something like, "won't you miss the seasons?".

As I said then, spending time in Central America I realized that the passage of time over the year always was evident, even when there was no time when the temperature dipped low and the leaves on trees turned red and orange like the maples that I still find breathtaking in New York and New England. In Honduras, the dry months of late spring were at first glance as green as the rainy months of September and October, but then, against that ever-green background I would note the tallest of the leafless tropical trees bursting into vivid flowering color, orange or pink or yellow.

For us now here, while the leaves are falling from trees, the sign of the season is less the baring of trunks than the first timid prospect of rain, and what follows from it: the greening of the hillsides that had turned steadily golden and then brown. Today I looked out and realized that a shrub I had last seen as a green vertical is now a solid purple mass entirely obscuring the foliage that still remains on the plant, while in the foreground, a camellia prepares to add a second wave of flowers to what already appears to be a solid dense layer of white over deep green.


It is with that understanding of seasons as less about some specific signal, more a sense of changing colors, including the way the blue of the sky shifts as rain clears the air, that I look at the two paintings here, one a winter scene in New Mexico, the other an impression of blossoming trees in spring. The lavender of the hills in winter gives way to the vivid blue sky of spring.

The onset of autumn in New York, now past, I know was red, and orange, and yellow; here, the ever-present flowers are again accompanied by a general green background. And in the hills of New Mexico, snow blanketing in the ground is lit pink and purple. And in each of these places, and others, as the colors change and the sun's light varies, seasons pass.