20. ❝ Grayscale Neglect

The color of truth is gray.

—André Gide

In 2012, the world (or parts of it anyway) was celebrating the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens. A wealthy woman who painted occasionally with us traveled to England to be part of festivities that included meeting the queen. An adventurous widow of extraordinary means, she had hosted the china painting class at her remarkable three-acre estate—filled with museum-quality work on every wall and available surface. “I’m a collector,” she said. Owner of several homes, by all accounts generous to her family, a patron of another painter I knew, trustee of a small college…I wondered if she understood the Dickens she was celebrating.

As most schoolchildren used to know, between the 1770s and the 1840s, England was transformed from an essentially agricultural island into the most powerful industrial nation in the world. Machines appeared that revolutionized cotton manufacture—the steam engine, the water frame, the spinning jenny. Transportation networks—canals, roads, railroads—led to a migration from country to city overnight. What happened next—the rise of manufacturers and merchants to political and social power—resulted in the inevitable separation of heads of industry from hands that produced. But human welfare didn’t keep pace with material prosperity. No one wrote about it better than Charles Dickens.

***

When he first saw grimy, dirty Manchester in 1838 he vowed to “strike the hardest blow in (his) power” for victims of exploitation in cotton mills. He did so over and over, never more than in “Hard Times,” the shortest of his books, but the most direct. In fictional Coketown, a wealthy retired merchant, Thomas Gradgrind, opens a school based on his Utilitarian worldview. A world obsessed with facts. A world where one character says, “I beg your pardon for interrupting you, sir…but I am sure you know the whole social system is a question of self-interest. What you must always appeal to, is a person’s self-interest. It’s your only hold.”

In the book “Charles Dickens and the Great Theater of the World,” Simon Callow writes, “He knew what poverty was. He knew what it was to be rejected, to be cast aside, to live in squalor.” For Dickens, the narrow focus on profit maximization and self-interest created an aesthetic blindness that squeezed all poetry and kindness from life. Beginning with “Oliver Twist” and its descriptions of the terrible plight of children, he became the most popular writer in England.

***

My graduate seminar, “Social Foundations of Education” asked the question, “What do people value and want to see in their schools?” I began with Dickens’ “Hard Times.” The novel, with its convoluted Victorian plot, ends with only one character achieving happiness—Sissy Jupe—the person least suited for a world where facts and figures held sway over the more humble ideas of faith and charity. The graduate students were troubled. They wanted to be part of a world with a broader agenda than economic, but they were being swept away on a tidal wave of expectations and assessments that measured less and less with more and more accuracy.

Society told them what to measure, what to stress, what to value. It became all they saw. All they were allowed to see if they wanted to keep their jobs. They packed away their art supplies, music lessons, geography, history, philosophy, physical education, industrial arts. All we have left in public education is what society sees as the path to professional financial success.

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Painters talk about value too. It gives depth and dimension to compositions. Artists use it to describe the amount of light or dark in a color. The simplest way to determine a color’s value is to imagine a color image run through a black-and-white copy machine. The result is a picture with all shades of gray from black to white. These are the values of the colors—the darker the color the lower the value. Color value is important because it helps create light/dark contrast. The darkest part of a painting helps bring the focal point to attention. Understanding value was difficult. I couldn’t understand why my colors were either too garish or too bland. Year after year, my projects seemed “off.” I didn’t know how to fix them.

***

One winter painting session the teacher chose pansies. With their two overlapping upper petals, two side petals, and a single wide bottom skirt with a beard coming from the center, they have a long popular history in art and with poets—who call them “love in idleness.” After sketching the pansy around the inverted V that is the center, the flower is filled in with a middle-value color. Deep values are added behind the side petals. Wiping at the edges creates lighter values for ruffles. I couldn’t do it. Eight frustrating weeks later, I joked to the teacher, “Looks like I failed pansies.” She didn’t disagree. For the next couple of years, whenever anyone painted the colorful little flowers, I just groaned and looked away.

“I beg your pardon for interrupting you, sir…but I am sure you know the whole social system is a question of self-interest. What you must always appeal to, is a person’s self-interest. It’s your only hold.”

My “pansy failure” became a running joke. I relegated my unfortunate cracker tray, with its bright, sinister-looking pansy faces marching down the center, to the laundry room, where its offending design was hidden beneath a pile of card-making tools.

Several years passed. One day the teacher said, “I have an idea. I think you need to focus on value. Let’s use pen and ink to do a series of black and white projects. You’ll get a better idea how ‘value quality’ helps.”

***

Using just black and white seemed odd when I had a paint box full of colors. The subjects seemed odder still. The teacher chose carnations, fuchsias, and birds for a set of small vases and trays. The pen was an unfamiliar tool, the projects complicated, the technique required attention to detail—something I had become less careful about.

Her plan worked. I began to see how high-value contrasts controlled visibility, while lower-value contrasts were calmer. I pulled out my college collection of tiny art books. I understood Rembrandt’s light shapes on dark backgrounds and John Singer Sargent’s middle-value contrasts in new ways. In a grayscale photo of a Claude Monet sunset, it was hard to find the sun. Below it the writer noted, “This trick of value contrasts has been called the ‘secret of the masters.’” The little books had been part of my library for many years, but I finally understood what I had been looking at all along.

***

On my own, I returned to pansies. Not neglecting value made the difference. I seldom paint on china with gold edges, although most painters prefer it. I made an exception for a pansy study. I wanted the lesson to stand out. The flowers are soft, the design works. Along the left side I used the pen that helped me understand value to write, “There’s pansies, that’s for thoughts—‘Ophelia in Hamlet.’”

When Facebook filed for its initial public offering, it revealed the combined pay of its top five executives—$83 million. It was the lead story in both web and print media. Two people will be billionaires. The same day a small article on page 11 reported new government figures—one in four children in America live below the poverty line. Forty-three percent of all children live in “economically unstable” homes. That news didn’t cycle through the Internet at all.

Since his death in 1870, Charles Dickens’ novels have never been out of print. In “Our Mutual Friend,” he wrote:

Mr. Podsnap settled that whatever he put behind him he put out of existence. Mr. Podsnap had even acquired a peculiar flourish of his right arm in often clearing the world of its most difficult problems by sweeping them behind him.

In painting, I learned as long as I used only high-value contrasts, my work would be limited. Extremes created problems. Ignoring them didn’t make them go away.

In “Hard Times,” Mr. Gradgrind says over and over, “Facts alone are what is wanted in life.” No deviation allowed.

Facts are important but they are not the only things. Dickens knew that. He wanted us to look into the gray. To see. To do something about the workhouse. The workhouse where, in another story, Bumble says, horrified, “Oliver Twist has asked for more!”

I often think about my former graduate education students when I paint—their dreams evaporating in a haze of regulations and constraints. I think about Oliver too. He is still asking for more. One hundred and seventy-four years have passed since his request.

I wonder how long he will have to wait.