Winter Light is the title of an Oregon album that I loved in the winter of 1974-75, my first spent in Wisconsin, where the light seemed to me more beautiful than in my home town, grey and overcast Pittsburgh. In Wisconsin, I told my family, it snows, and then it clears up and gets really sunny and really cold and sparkly the next day. Not like Pittsburgh, where it snows and stays in the mid-30s and the snow is quickly slush. I spent most of my high school winters wet to the knee – it was the early 1970s and bell bottoms were in style – perfect sponges for all that Pittsburgh slush.
I think the famed Northern light in the paintings of the Dutch masters, Vermeer, Aelbert Cuyp, Pieter de Hooch, is winter light too, mostly.
Winter light is also what I saw when I walked out of work today, still light at 4:58 p.m. on January 12th – even though the predicters say that the climate here in WI is going to get more like Pittsburgh – more rain on top of snow, warmer, cloudier.
- Courtyard H.C. White Hall, UW-Madison
- Courtyard H.C. White Hall, UW-Madison
- Courtyard H.C. White Hall, UW-Madison
- Courtyard of a House in Delft, 1658, Pieter de Hooch
- Aelbert Cuyp, River landscape with Riders, ca.1655
- Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid (1658–1660)
